Custom Promotion vs. Rule Set Discount

[Kathleane0]

My goal is to discount specific days of the week (based on booking data) to encourage booking shoulder nights. For instance if I want to discount Sundays and Mondays during the month of June, would a rule-set or a custom promotion be the way to handle this?

[Lazmee0]

Hi Kathleane! This is a brilliant strategy for boosting occupancy on those tricky shoulder nights, and June is the perfect time to test it out. To achieve exactly what you're looking for, a Rule-Set is definitely the right tool for the job because it gives you precise, surgical control over your calendar. You can specifically isolate the month of June, select only Sundays and Mondays, and apply your percentage discount to just those days without affecting your weekend rates.

Custom promotions, on the other hand, are fantastic for broad marketing pushes but are much more rigid, usually applying a blanket discount across consecutive dates or relying on 'Early Bird' rules rather than letting you cherry-pick specific days of the week. Just keep a quick eye on your minimum stay requirements when you set it up, if you have a strict weekend minimum, you'll want to ensure it doesn't accidentally block a guest from grabbing that discounted Sunday-to-Monday stay. Best of luck filling up your June calendar, it's an excellent way to maximize your revenue!

[Emiel1]

@Lazmee0 

I consider your reply as totally nonsenses, sorry to say so..

Please provide practical examples of how such a problem can be solved in your opinion, thank you.

[Lazmee0]

Hi @Emiel,

Thank you for sharing your perspective. I do want to respectfully mention that describing another member's contribution as totally nonsense can be quite discouraging, especially in a community where many of us are simply trying to help one another by sharing ideas and experiences. We may not always interpret a question the same way, but I believe we can disagree while still being respectful. My intention was never to suggest that Airbnb has an automated, algorithmic feature that scans booking data and applies discounts by itself. I fully agree that such a hands-off, programmable feature does not currently exist.

What I was sharing is a practical workaround using the tools Airbnb does give us. If a host has already reviewed their own data and identified that Sundays and Mondays in June are consistently underperforming, they can manually use the following practical steps to solve the problem:

Create a Custom Rule Set: In the multi-calendar, a host can select the specific Sunday and Monday dates for June, create a custom rule set, and apply a specific percentage discount (e.g., 10% off) strictly to those selected days. This allows them to manually target those days without lowering their Friday/Saturday weekend rates.

Adjust Booking Restrictions: Because shoulder-night occupancy is heavily affected by minimum-stay settings, a host can use that same rule set to reduce the minimum stay to 1 night specifically for those slower weekdays.

Allow Gap-Night Bookings: Enabling gap-night settings allows the system to automatically open up and encourage bookings for those exact 1 or 2-night "orphan" spots left behind between weekend stays.

In my experience, combining manual rule-set adjustments for pricing with smarter booking restrictions is highly effective for capturing weekday travelers.

I appreciate your correction regarding the lack of native automation for this, and I'd be genuinely interested in hearing what alternative approach or strategy you would recommend to help Kathleane fill her June calendar.

[Daniel15557]

Building on Lazmee's answer, which is spot on for the surgical control, the one thing worth adding is what each option signals to the search algorithm. A rule-set just silently lowers the nightly price. A custom promotion also shows a strikethrough price and a deal badge in the search results, which is a visibility and click-through signal, not only a discount. So the real trade-off is precision with a rule-set versus a temporary visibility bump with a promotion.

For recurring Sunday and Monday softness I would make the rule-set your permanent baseline, and layer a short custom promotion on top only when a specific window like June is still booking slowly, to grab that strikethrough exposure.

One lever beyond price for shoulder nights: drop your minimum stay to 1 on those Sunday and Monday dates. A lot of shoulder-night gaps are minimum-stay problems as much as price problems, and a single discounted night that bridges two bookings is exactly the orphan gap you want to be eligible to fill.

[Emiel1]

@Kathleane0 

There is no programmable option on Airbnb to "discount specific days of the week, based on booking data"