Hi @Becca1603
I would leave Smart Pricing turned on and set a high minimum price that would be appropriate for high season (at a high minimum, it's not unusual for most or all of your nights to display the same price). For dates in the near future (before the popular season) that likely won't get booked at the high minimum price, set a discount. You can adjust the discounts for different dates according to your strategy.
Keeping Smart Pricing turned on ensures that you won't miss out if the prices for some high season nights go higher than your set minimum (which will likely not happen until much closer to the high season).
The above is the simplest way - you can also do your own detailed seasonal pricing using the Professional Tools feature if you don't mind the extra work (this may be what you mean when you say you're considering using custom pricing rules).
As an aside - it seems some hosts have run into technical problems with dates where they've manually typed prices directly onto the calendar (instead of just setting a minimum and letting smart pricing do the work). I haven't seen large numbers of complaints about it here, but I've had these technical issues myself and I'm having such a problem right now - for some reason I can't get a very straightforward promotion to run on a handful of my nights where I had previously typed a manual price. I can't find any error or understand why. Some other hosts have also reported problems, not identical to mine, but also strange issues on dates where they had previously manually typed prices to override smart pricing. As there could be some glitch, it may be better to think twice before manually typing a price on the calendar (if this is something you were considering).
One more thing on the high minimum price that I suggested above: the moment your price increases (in whatever way you choose to adjust it), you could take a hit in search results, as you probably know. You'll need to keep an eye on where you rank and make sure you don't price yourself right off the pages (or at least not for dates that you want to get booked soon). Hope it helps.
