Where you sleep each night: bookings, options and gaps in your accommodation

The night as the unit

What usually goes wrong with accommodation (the unbooked night between two cities, the booking that starts a day late) is easier to spot when you count nights. That’s why each trip’s Alojamiento (“Accommodation”) screen (on your phone, inside «Más», “More”) opens with a strip of one box per night.

A night carries the date of the evening it starts: the “night of the 3rd” runs from the 3rd to the 4th. So a trip from the 1st to the 5th has four nights (1, 2, 3 and 4), because on the 5th you go home. Bookings work the same way: check-in on the 3rd and check-out on the 6th are three nights, and check-out has to be at least one day after check-in.

A stay counts 120 nights at most: a check-out date typed with the wrong year can’t fill the screen with nights.

Place and stay: the hotel and the nights in it

Kokai keeps two things apart:

• The place is the accommodation on the map: a pin in the Accommodation category, with its address, phone number and photos.
• The stay is a set of nights there: check-in and check-out, times, status (booked or option), total price and currency, free cancellation deadline, the booking document and your notes.

It isn’t a field of the place because the same hotel can come up twice in a trip (two nights in Lisbon on arrival and one after coming back from Porto) and several options can compete for the same nights. Nor is it a field of the document: an option has no confirmation yet, and the stay has to be describable to the AI without the booking reference.

A stay can be accommodation or a night in transit (a night train, a plane, a ferry), which has no place or times but counts as a night sorted. On a hotel’s card on the map, «Noches aquí» (“Nights here”) shows its stays and «Añadir noches aquí» (“Add nights here”) creates one.

The states of each night

Each box in the strip has an icon and a name as well as a colour, and below it there’s a legend for the states that appear in that trip:

Kokai also flags bookings that fall outside the trip, with a night beyond its dates: either the trip’s dates or the booking’s are wrong. The strip also appears in the trip summary, with “N of M with accommodation”.

Comparing options: price per night and the median distance

Each undecided option shows two figures, designed to compare accommodation across stays of different lengths:

• Price per night: the total price divided by its nights. An apartment at €390 for three nights comes to €130 a night.
• Closeness: «A unos… de lo que tienes planeado esos días» (“About… from what you have planned on those days”). It’s the median of the straight-line distances from the accommodation to each place in the plan on those nights and on the check-out day.

If those days have nothing planned, it measures against your must-see places, and if there are none, against all your places. Accommodation never counts, and the option has to be placed on the map. These are straight-line distances: they’re for comparing, not for knowing how long it will take you.

It uses the median, the middle value once the distances are sorted, because almost every trip has one place far from the rest and the average gets dragged along by it.

Each day of the plan starts and ends at your accommodation

With a booked stay, each day of the plan starts at the previous night’s accommodation and ends at that night’s. Only bookings count: an undecided option isn’t somewhere to set off from.

• At the top of the day: «Desde…» (“From…”) with the accommodation’s name, or «Sales de…» (“You leave…”) with «hasta las 11:00» (“until 11:00”) if you check out that day.
• At the bottom of the day: «Duermes en…» (“You sleep at…”), or «Entras en…» (“You check in at…”) with «desde las 15:00» (“from 15:00”) on the day you arrive somewhere new. On a night in transit, «Esta noche: Tren nocturno a Viena» (“Tonight: Night train to Vienna”).
• If that night of the trip has nothing booked: «Sin alojamiento para esta noche» (“No accommodation for tonight”), with a link to the Accommodation screen.
• Journeys from the hotel and back to it count towards the day’s total.

When the AI suggests the plan, it groups each day’s places near the accommodation and allows for check-out and check-in on the day you change hotels.

Accommodation alerts

Your device schedules them as local notifications, with no server and no connection, by its own clock. Only for booked stays of the accommodation type.

Across all your reminders, for all your trips, 60 at most are scheduled, the nearest first.

You enter the cancellation deadline yourself in «Cancelación gratis hasta» (“Free cancellation until”), or it comes from the PDF. Check it on the website where you booked: Kokai can’t know if it has changed.

During the trip: «Esta noche duermes en…» (“Tonight you sleep at…”)

While the trip is under way, the On the road screen («En ruta») shows the «Esta noche duermes en» (“Tonight you sleep at”) card at the top, with the accommodation’s name, the check-in time if you arrive today and, if your position is known, the distance to it.

• «Volver al alojamiento» (“Back to the accommodation”), if the accommodation is placed on the map, opens Google Maps with directions to the hotel. This one does need a connection.
• «Enseñar la dirección» (“Show the address”) displays in large type, for a taxi driver or at reception, the name, the address (or the coordinates, if it has none), the phone number and the booking reference.

All of that comes from your device and works offline.

Adding a booking from its PDF

With «Desde el PDF de la reserva» (“From the booking PDF”), Kokai reads the confirmation on your device, without AI: provider, booking reference, dates and times, price, free cancellation and address. Which confirmations it understands is covered in Booking PDFs. If it’s accommodation with dates, it saves it in Documents and links it, in this order:

1. to the stay that already had that document;
2. to the option for that same hotel on those nights, which becomes booked;
3. to a new stay. The hotel is looked up by name among the trip’s places and, if it isn’t there, by its address in OpenStreetMap (Nominatim). Offline, it stays unplaced until you tap «Situarlo en el mapa» (“Place it on the map”).

It only fills in empty fields, and when it’s done it tells you what it read («Leído en este dispositivo: …, 3 noches. Revisa que esté bien.», “Read on this device: …, 3 nights. Check it’s right.”).

What happens when you delete

Check-in and check-out in Google Calendar (soon)

With Google Calendar connected, each booked accommodation will have two events in the “Kokai” calendar: «Entrada: …» (“Check-in: …”) and «Salida: …» (“Check-out: …”), half an hour long at their time or all-day if there’s no time, marked as free, with the address and, in the description, the booking reference and your notes. It’s built, but can’t be used yet: the Google connection still has to be registered.

Searching for accommodation on other websites

Each night without accommodation, and the «Buscar en otras webs» (“Search other websites”) button, offer links to nine websites (Booking.com, Airbnb, Expedia, Hotels.com, Vrbo, Agoda, Trip.com, Kayak and Google Hotels) with the place, dates and travellers filled in, which you can change first. Kokai doesn’t connect to any of them: it only builds the link, and nothing goes out until you tap one. Each link is explained in the guide Open Booking.com, Airbnb or Expedia with your dates already filled in.

If a version of the app is built with affiliate links, it says so next to them («Algunos son enlaces de afiliado…», “Some are affiliate links…”). Without that sentence, they carry no affiliate tag. More in the guide.

What the AI knows about your accommodation

If you use AI, for each booked stay it receives the nights, the name, the coordinates and the times (or “in transit”), plus the nights still unbooked. Never the price, the booking, the reference or your notes, nor the options you’re comparing. More in Your data.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and references

The original documentation for what is cited here, checked on this page’s review date.

1. Median Wikipedia
2. Arithmetic mean Wikipedia
3. Events: the events resource in the Google Calendar API Google for Developers
4. Nominatim Usage Policy OpenStreetMap Foundation
5. PDF.js Mozilla
6. ISO 8601 (YYYY-MM-DD dates) Wikipedia

Keep reading

• The planHow each day’s plan comes together in Kokai: timed places, notes and transfers, how long from one stop to the next and how to ask the AI for a draft itinerary.
• On the roadHow Kokai alerts you near a saved place: the radii it uses, how it avoids false GPS alerts, what it records of your route and what it does with your location.
• Booking PDFsWhat Kokai reads from a booking confirmation PDF offline without AI: 65 brands, 8 classes, labels in 7 languages, dates, price, cancellation and an example.
• Search for accommodationHow to build Booking.com, Airbnb, Expedia, Vrbo, Agoda, Trip.com, Kayak and Google Hotels search URLs with destination, dates and guests, with examples.
• Your dataWhat Kokai keeps on your device, what goes to your account copy, which services get anything and when, what never leaves, and how to export or delete it all.
• GlossaryTravel glossary: what a geofence, a stay, a booking reference, GPS hysteresis or PMTiles is. 35 travel and map terms, with the figures Kokai uses.