Setting pricing customizations in PriceLabs

Pricing Customizations

At PriceLabs we strive to recommend the best data-driven prices for your vacation rental and Airbnb listings to get bookings and drive revenue. While that works for most hosts and vacation rental managers, we recognize that you may want to customize certain aspects of the pricing recommendations based on your preferences and what you have observed about your listings. For example, we apply last minute discounts to help get bookings for dates that are close-in and have a reduced chance of getting booked. However, you may not want last minute discounting because you want advanced notice to prepare for a guest. Or you really don't mind, and would be ok going more aggressive to get any bookings you can.

From a revenue perspective we give a discount for orphan days (one or two open days between two bookings) because bookings on these days are harder to come by. But we understand that you may not always want to fill orphan days at a discount, since it means turning the place around in a short time (whether you use a cleaning crew or do it yourself).

You might want to adjust weekend price trends, apply a separate minimum price for far-out dates and weekends, or even change what weekends mean to you!

Take a look at the left panel when reviewing prices for a listing. Click the "Edit" link, and a panel pops up. You'll see that there are a few different kinds of pricing customizations -- last-minute prices, orphan day prices, day of week adjustments -- available in addition to minimum stay customization. In this article, we'll focus on the basic price-related customizations, you can find a more detailed overview of our minimum stay rules here.



Available Customizations

Last Minute Prices

By default, we apply a gradual 30% last-minute discount over the next 15 days from the current day. There are four options available if you want to apply your own customization for either discounts or premiums:

  1. % Flat: For example, if you set a 25% flat discount within 5 days, a 25% discount will be applied to days 1 through 5, where day 1 is the present day.
  2. % Gradual: If you set a 35% gradual discount within 7 days, then for a date that is 7 nights away, the discount will be 0%, and every day that it gets closer, we keep adding a 5% (=35/7) discount such that on day 1 the discount becomes 35%. This results in a more gradual discounting rather than a step change.
  3. Fixed: If you set 70 USD (or the currency your listing is priced in) within 10 days, we'll set the prices to 70 for days 1 through 10.
  4. No last minute adjustment: If you do not wish to apply our default last-minute discounts to your listings.
  5. Market driven: This option lets you set last minute prices based on how your market is performing. These numbers change every day based on the market data to maximize revenue.

Orphan Day Prices

With the Orphan Day Prices customization, you can adjust your rates to attract bookings and fill the gaps in your calendar. By default, we apply a 20% discount to gaps of 1 or 2 open days between bookings. You can freely adjust the default according to your preference with extensive management options:
  1. Add varying pricing for Weekdays and Weekends
  2. Set up to 5 multiple levels of rules
  3. Apply each rule within a specific day range
You have 2 options in applying your pricing:

  1. Fixed: As an example in the above image, the first rule implies that if you have any gaps of 1 and 2 nights within 7 days from the current date, a fixed price of 200 USD will apply if the gap falls under a weekday, and 250 USD if it's a weekend.
  2. %: You can select between Discount or Premium. In the example above, the second rule applies a discount of 20% for weekdays and 15% for weekends for gaps between 3 and 4 nights.
  1. You can add the same number of gap nights to multiple rules for different day ranges.
  2. The number of nights should be set in ascending order (in the example above, the first rule where gaps between 1 and 2 nights CANNOT be applied AFTER the rule for gaps between 3 and 4 nights)
  3. You can set the same number of day range under the "apply only within" section to multiple rules
If you'd like to completely turn OFF our default discount and let no other pricing customization for orphan days apply, then choose "No Orphan Day Adjustment" from the dropdown:

Please note that if an Orphan Day also becomes a Last-Minute Day and discounts/premiums are set for both customizations (or both defaults are in effect), the system will use the rules below:
  1. If both are discounts, the larger discount is applied (since applying both discounts can result in a huge discount)
  2. If both are premiums, both are applied
  3. If one is a discount and one is a premium, both are applied

Day of Week Pricing Adjustments  

Our dynamic pricing recommendations already account for the day-of-week trends; any adjustments made with this customization will be used on top of our defaults and NOT replace them as with the two previous customizations. Therefore, we recommend most users refrain from using this customization. Still, there might be times when you observe trends for your listings that differ from our default adjustments -- as an example, corporate housing accommodations in a city might see more demand during the weekdays even though there are more "vacationers" during the weekends.


To adjust your pricing recommendations for something like this, you can enter a percentage-based adjustment that applies on top of our price recommendations. The value of the percentage can vary between -75% and 500%, and leaving a box blank implies no adjustment. You can apply these at the listing, group, and account levels.

Occupancy Based Adjustments

If the switch is off, we will automatically adjust daily rates based on your listing's occupancy based on the default profile. Still, you can toggle on this customization to change the percentages by which your rates are adjusted or select from a few different pre-loaded profiles designed to implement various pricing strategies. 



You can read our complete guide to occupancy-based adjustments here.

Minimum Weekend Price 

This customization can set a different minimum price for your weekends (even though it might be last-minute in the low season), leaving your current minimum price to be used for weekdays. Again, note that having this min-price below the listing's lowest price will not have any effect, as our prices will not go below the lowest price anyway.

  1. Fixed: This allows you to enter a flat rate to be used for your minimum weekend price.
  2. % change on base price: This will set your minimum weekend price to be a percentage of your base price. You can enter either a positive or negative number here. 
  3. % change on min price: This will set your minimum weekend price to be a percentage of your set minimum price. This can also be a positive or negative number. 
Please note that if you use both the Minimum Far Out Pricing and the Minimum Weekend Pricing, if you use the % based option, then both adjustments will be used for far-out weekends. 

Minimum Far-out Price

This customization can ensure that the prices for dates beyond a specific horizon don't fall below a certain threshold (even though it might be low season in the middle of the week). Note that having this min-price below the listing's lowest price will not have any effect, as our prices will not go below the minimum price anyway.


These can be useful in allowing two levels of min-price settings: You could set an overall min-price of 120 but a far-out min-price of 160 outside 15 days. This means that our prices will go below 160 only for last-minute days. 
If you click the drop-down here, you'll see three options: 
  1. Fixed: This allows you to enter a flat rate to be used for your far-our minimum price.
  2. % change on base price: This will set your far-out minimum price to be a percentage of your base price. You can enter either a positive or negative number here. 
  3. % change on min price: This will set your far-our minimum price to be a percentage of your set minimum price. This can also be a positive or negative number. 
Please note that if you enter discounts using the % change options, your rates will not drop below your listing's set minimum price. 

Define Your Own Weekend

Our algorithms use Friday and Saturday nights as the default weekend days for various customizations, like minimum weekend price and dynamic minimum stay. With this customization, you can change that! This can be very useful if:
  1. You're in destination locations where people come for longer stays (so you might want to define the weekend as Thu-Fri-Sat, or Fri-Sat-Sun, or Thu-Fri-Sat-Sun)!
  2. You're in a location where weekends are shifted, like Thu-Fri in the Middle East.

Custom Seasonal Prices 

This customization can be used to set seasonal minimum, base, and maximum prices for your listings throughout the year. If you leave any price field blank, the system will take the listing's default prices. You can read our complete set of instructions on custom seasonal prices here.

Putting Customizations in Place

Now let's apply some customizations and see what happens! To do this, turn on the switch on the pop-up and edit the values to what you want. As you hit "Save Customizations," we'll recalculate the prices using the new settings. You'll notice this in two places:
  1. If you hover over the dates that should be impacted, you'll see the reason being specified.

  1. The panel on the left will specify the customizations you have set

Account and Group-Level Customizations 

And that's not all! If you want to apply certain customization for all listings in your account or groups of listings, you can use the Customization page. The group/account level settings will be ignored for listings with their own specific customization. The account level settings can be set for each PMS/channel you use. This page also lets you quickly review and update customizations on each listing individually. You can read more about bulk updating using account and group-level customizations here. 

Advanced Customizations

We have recently added some customizations under "Advanced Customizations" that may be helpful for you:
  1. Adjacent Day pricing customization
  2. Portfolio occupancy adjustments
  3. Pricing offsets for mapped listings
These features are based on feedback we have been receiving from you - we hope these will give you more control as you continue to use PriceLabs! 

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