Looking to offer a discount for the winter months,

[Gideon30]

I do not see a way of offering a discount for the winter (slow) months.  January February and March are my slow months and would like to offer a discounted rate. 

I'm afraid if I just lower the price,  guests will book for the summer months at the reduced rate.

Thanks, 

[Mike-And-Jane0]

@Gideon30 do you have smart pricing activated? If not how do you currently set your prices?

[Gideon30]

No, I do not use Smart-Pricing. 

Still getting the hang of the site, but I wanted to vet and approve guests before letting them stay. Maybe I'm being paranoid. 

I believe if I use the Smart-Pricing guests can Automatically schedule a stay?  

Maybe the way to go..?

Thx, 

[Mike-And-Jane0]

@Gideon30 confusion here so lets try and help

Pricing:

If you switch on smart pricing you set a min and max price for the algorithm to work with. Many hosts do not think smart pricing works well and if you do use it you need to be happy with the minimum price you set.

Without smart pricing you just set the price you want by clicking on a date or group of dates in your calendar and then typing in the nightly price in the window that pops up.

Even if not using smart pricing set the min to a reasonable number and this is the price automatically put into your calendar as it opens up

Booking settings:

Either Instant book which you appear to have decided not to use or guests have to request a booking. We have always used IB but advice from many hosts especially if not on-site is not to use it.

If you have more questions then type @ and then a dropdown appears where you can tag me (or others) so we are told you have replied.

[Neill23]

@Gideon30 we are in a similar situation - high summer demand, some shoulder season demand with/without price adjustments, high Christmas/New Years demand, and super quiet during our first winter.  We started hosting last summer, and our experiences might help.

First and foremost, I would recommend that you do some reading in this forum regarding Smart Pricing.  I find far more folks with many years of experience suggesting that you DO NOT enable it, as it will likely mean that you leave money on the table in your high season.  We booked an ABB in our market while we were renovating the property that we now have listed, and the hosts there shared with us that they were on Smart Pricing.  The rate that we got was well below what the market rates would easily bear (this was early July/22) and it gave us an example that was reinforced by our reading in this forum.

ABB recommends that we price at 682 for the coming summer season.  We had it up at 688, and our July and August are both ~65% booked.  I bumped the prices higher on long weekends last summer and did the same this year.  I bumped our prices by 100 for the remaining Jul/Aug days (making us 110 or so above the ABB smart price), and we are still getting bookings.

Recommendation:  keep Smart Pricing off, and follow your market/tweak your rates.

To adjust for low season:
Keep your base rate at your summer rate, and manually change the prices for the low season.  Our Jan/Feb weekday rate is 298, and we still do not fill up.  You can adjust bulk dates in the calendar.  For example, click Feb 1, hit the shift key (on a computer), and click Feb 15, and you can set a price for the whole 16 days.

It is more labour intensive than Smart Pricing, but you will likely yield higher ROI on your investment.

Hope that helps, and good luck to you.

[Andrea4731]

You can manually adjust the prices of specific dates/months by highlighting those dates in your calendar & adjusting the price for only those dates.