Price Next Season Before You Have To

The annual panic

Repricing usually happens like this. Some time in the autumn you notice next year’s calendar is open, you think “I should put the rates up”, you look at what you charged last year, add a number that feels about right, and apply it to everything.

That process has two problems. The first is that “about right” is doing an enormous amount of work. The second is that it treats every season the same, when the whole reason you have seasons is that they’re different.

Your peak rate might be exactly where it should be — booked out, full price achieved, no reason to touch it. Your shoulder season might be quietly discounting itself into the ground, achieving eighty percent of the rate you nominally charge, which means the number on your listing is fiction. Raising both by 5% makes one slightly better and the other slightly more fictional.

Start with what you actually achieved

The foundation for any of this is a number most hosts don’t have to hand: what did I really get per night, by season, over time?

That’s now a chart. Each year is its own curve across the months, with the rate you set drawn as a separate line, so the gap between the two is the entire story. Months you’ve already got on the books for the future are drawn differently from months that have been and gone, because a half-full future month is not the same kind of fact as a completed one.

One caveat, stated up front, because it changes how you should read it. The nightly value is the gross booking total spread across the nights — and it includes the cleaning fee. On one real property, seventeen of twenty-five bookings carried a cleaning fee of roughly $116 against an average stay of 4.4 nights. So short stays look like they comfortably beat a room rate that excludes cleaning, because they’re being measured with the cleaning fee folded in.

This matters most exactly where you’re most likely to act on it — a two-night booking in a quiet season looks better than it is. A room-only figure is the obvious improvement and it isn’t built yet.

We’d rather you read the chart knowing that than trust it blindly.

Then let it recommend, with its hands tied

Given the achieved numbers, Airflow will recommend a yearly increase per season: whether to escalate that season at all, and by how much.

The interesting part is the rules the recommendation has to obey, which are enforced rather than suggested:

It will only recommend a rise where the most recent full year achieved at least 95% of the rate you set. If a season isn’t getting what you’re already asking, the evidence says the asking price isn’t the constraint. Raising it is the wrong lever, and the recommendation won’t offer it.

It won’t recommend more than 15% unless two years independently agree. One exceptional year is a story; two is a trend. A single strong season shouldn’t be allowed to talk you into a rise you then spend the next year defending.

On the real property we built this against, the recommendation was genuinely mixed: leave peak, high and mid-season alone, escalate one quiet season by 3%, and lower the low-season rate. That’s a more useful answer than a flat percentage across the board, and it’s the kind of answer you only get by looking at seasons separately.

It arrives as a table under your price table with one Apply button. Tick the seasons you agree with, apply, and the escalation settings are written to exactly those seasons. And you can ignore it entirely — on that same property, the host looked at the recommendation and chose not to apply it. That’s a perfectly good outcome. The point is to make the decision informed, not to make it for you.

What escalation actually does

Once set, escalation compounds from a base year, and — this is a detail that sounds pedantic and isn’t — it compounds by the year of each night, not the year the booking was made.

A guest booking in December for the following August gets August’s rate, escalated for August’s year. Booking early doesn’t accidentally buy last year’s prices, and a long stay that crosses New Year is priced correctly on both sides of it. Get this wrong and the error is invisible until someone works out they can book eighteen months ahead to dodge an increase.

Escalation is also per season, not per property. You can compound your green season and leave peak fixed, which is exactly what that real recommendation suggested.

The seasons underneath

All of this sits on a pricing engine that handles the shapes real businesses actually use.

Each season can be an absolute nightly rate, a percentage above your base, or a percentage below it. The absolute mode exists because that’s how rack rates work — a property with three seasonal rates of $620, $810 and $1,500 has three prices, not three percentages off a hypothetical base, and they need to match the listing elsewhere exactly. The earlier system only did percentages, which couldn’t express that at all.

Seasons recur annually, stored as month-and-day rather than fixed dates, and expanded to the booking year when a price is calculated. Set them once. A season that wraps the New Year is split across the boundary and handled properly.

A season can also carry no price change at all and exist purely to set a minimum stay.

On top of the seasonal total sit discount rules — weekly for seven nights or more, monthly for twenty-eight, last-minute, early bird, trip length, and custom promotions with usage limits. Rules can stack or be marked exclusive. They apply after the accommodation total and before fees and taxes, which is the order that produces a number your accountant recognises.

A quote is then built night by night: resolve each night to its season, take that season’s rate with escalation applied for that night’s year, sum it, apply discounts, then cleaning, mandatory fees, taxes, extras. You get the full breakdown back — per season, per discount — rather than a single number you have to take on faith.

Why this is worth an hour

The gap between the rate you set and the rate you achieve is the single most valuable number in a booking business, and almost nobody has it. It’s the difference between “we’re fully booked, business is great” and “we’re fully booked because we’re twelve percent cheap”.

You do not need software to raise your prices. You need it to tell you which prices, and to refuse to recommend a rise where the evidence doesn’t support one.

An hour with the chart, honestly read — remembering the cleaning fee is in there — will tell you more about your pricing than a competitor survey will.

If you’re building a rate card from scratch rather than reviewing one, start with How to Set Seasonal Rates for a Short-Term Rental — fixed rates versus percentages, recurring seasons, discount stacking, and the escalation detail that catches everyone.

Related: Stop Paying Per Property on the cost side, One Resource or One Hundred on scaling the same decisions across a portfolio, and See Your Whole Business in One Place on the reporting around it. Or look at Airflow’s features.