Setting your prices without leaving money behind

The three ways to set a price

The simplest is a fixed price per night, optionally with a separate rate for a weekend or a full week. That suits a property with one tariff and few seasons. Sixteen of our properties run on that model.

The second is a price per period: you cut the year into stretches and set an amount per stretch. That is what most of our hosts do, one hundred and forty-nine out of two hundred and twenty-two. It suits a property where high, shoulder and low season genuinely differ.

The third is a grid per day. It lets you give each day its own amount, and it is the only model that lets you price a bridging day differently from the rest of that week. Fifty-seven properties are set up that way.

Which model you pick determines what the system does with a request that does not fit neatly. A fixed night price simply multiplies; a grid reads off the days; a period price has to decide what happens when a stay touches two periods. Most surprises come from that last one.

Where hosts leave money behind

The most common case is the simplest: there is no price. At 78 of our 222 live properties no night price is filled in. Those properties show price on request, and a guest who is comparing mostly clicks on to a property that shows an amount.

The second is a missing uplift for a shorter stay. We checked at several properties what a benchmark stay of seven nights produces against what the host asks on their own website. The gap ran up to sixty euro per stay, always to the host's disadvantage, because their frequency did not exist in the model or fell onto a shorter branch.

The third is a per-person price that does not scale. At one property every party size from one to six paid the same, while the host's own site clearly listed a surcharge per extra person. The gap came to ninety euro on an ordinary stay, and that on every booking again.

The fourth is quieter and costs nothing until it happens: no maximum stay. One hundred and seventeen of our properties have none, and a thirty-night stay is then bookable at the nightly rate. With a price that drops per night, such a long stay quickly becomes unintentionally cheap.

The trap nobody expects

There is one error that only shows up when a guest finds it: a price that does not rise neatly with duration. We checked across our properties whether a longer stay always costs more than a shorter one, and that is not the case everywhere.

At one property the price for six nights sat almost nineteen hundred euro above the price for seven. A guest who wants six nights then pays more than one taking seven. That is not a calculation error in the system but the result of periods meeting differently at a different duration.

It mostly happens with a period price whose boundaries do not fall on the changeover day. A stay crossing a boundary sometimes loses a weekend uplift that a shorter stay keeps, and the order reverses. You find it by recalculating four, five, six and seven nights for the same arrival date.

We check this on our side and flag it when we see it, but it is your price and therefore your call. What we do not do is quietly correct something: you would then be charging an amount you never set.

What to fill in at minimum

Start with a night price, even if you refine it later. A property with an amount gets compared; one showing price on request gets skipped. For orientation: across our properties the median night price is two hundred and ten euro, with ten per cent under eighty and ten per cent over a thousand.

Then set a minimum stay. One hundred and eighty-three of our properties do, and it saves you one-night requests you would decline anyway. Add a maximum too, even a generous one, because that rules out the long stay that becomes too cheap per night.

Fill in a weekend price and a week price if yours differ. One hundred and sixteen properties have a weekend price and ninety-nine a week price. With nothing there, the system simply carries on at the nightly rate, which is rarely what you meant for a long weekend.

And recalculate one stay afterwards. Pick an ordinary arrival date, ask for four to eight nights, and check whether the amount matches what you would charge. That takes five minutes and it is the only check that tests all three models at once.

Frequently asked questions

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