Weekly and Monthly Discounts - excluding periods

[Martin29]

Hi folks,

I live in New Orleans and the months of April and February usually help out alot to pay for my property taxes (Jazz Fest and Mardi Gras). Is there a way to apply weekly and monthly discounts to my listing for all other months but those? I tried to online, but I cound't find a way how to. 

Thanks in advance for your help,

Martin.

[Jessica-and-Henry0]

@Martin29

Instead of taking away the weekly/monthly discounts for those months, I would suggest you take a slightly difference approach for April and Feburary by increasing your per night fees for those months or dates you want so that even with the discounts you are able to get higher payouts. (FYI - this is what I do.) 

From what I understand there is no way to adjust discount rates for certain periods, only the per night prices. Hope this helps! 

[Alice-and-Jeff0]

@Martin29 - There in no way to eliminate the discount during key periods.  You do have a couple of options.

1. During those months you raise the rates to make up for the difference of the discount.  Use the Seasonal Pricing option to make the property more expensive during key periods. 

2. Or conversely, don't offer a discount at all and offer it manually for guests who book for longer periods.  You could provide an "offer" in your listing that says from October to March, for every 3 nights you book, you get a 4th one free or "booking from X date to X date - we provide a discount of 10% for every stay over 7 nights"  or something like that.  It requires manual work to do it this way.  

[Caroline618]

This is a big failing of AirBnB booking and pricing system. You can do this on Homeaway, Booking.com, etc., and in fact I struggle to think of any portal that has this issue.

Putting your nightly prices up distorts the pricing, as a) can make your property too expensive for those who do not want to stay for a month, b) could result in you breaching any Rate Parity agreements you may have with other portals, c) putting notes on longer stay discounts does not always work as your price and placement in search results is determined by your price entered in the system (manual notes about discounts is only visible if the guests clicks on your listing, which is highly unlikely if your listing is 30% more expensive than the average).

For example during the winter period, we give up to 30% discount for 28 nights or more. In order to exclude June-July-Aug-Sept (our peak periods) we will have to increase our nightly rates by 30%, which means we will be well out of the running for anyone wanting to stay for a week or even 2 weeks (average stay in this period is 2 weeks).

At the moment we remove the monthly discounts, the moment we put our prices for Summer period, which means we have to disable monthly discount at the start of each December, and activate it again between Spet-Dec.

I have to declare an interest as my husband's company develops and sells their own booking system, which we use for our own direct bookings on my website, which is also synced with AirBnB.

He cannot understand why AirBnB cannot fix this, as according to him, it is just a few lines of code. OK, most software engineers make such wild claims, but I happen to know he is right on this one. It took his engineers less than half a day to implement this function on their software, test it, and make it live, and that was over 5 years ago!!