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How to use Date-specific Overrides to Adjust Prices for Events and Seasons

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Date specific overrides
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One of the most important things to keep a check on as a property manager is your pricing strategy. You must constantly check your OTAs, channel managers, or your PMS to ensure you are pricing according to the market. Even when you have a good strategy in place, a few days require more attention than others. The demand is high suddenly, and you want a different pricing strategy. This is where a feature like Date-Specific Overrides comes to help. This feature can further customize your pricing according to specific demands on specific dates.

What are Date-Specific Overrides, and Why use them?

We have customizations that can be applied to various dates helping your pricing work intelligently. Most of these customizations are applied on a rolling basis to all dates. On specific dates, you might want more control over your pricing. Here you can use our date-specific overrides.

For example, you may want to add a premium to specific date ranges or holidays such as the Fourth of July, Labor Day, or even Christmas. 

Note: Our algorithm already applies a premium to important days or days when there is high demand. Date-specific overrides are an exception to this premium. 

Let’s say your maximum price is $500. Due to the high occupancy and high demand for particular dates, you are already hitting your max price. Here, you can notice that people are willing to pay higher prices for a good stay. Your first thought might be to increase your max price. However, increasing that might affect pricing on other days as well. A better option would be to add a premium to your pricing and ensure you capitalize on the demand on these specific days.

You can make exceptions and adjustments to your pricing for these specific days – Date Specific Overrides. You can enable this feature when your goal is to enable different pricing for specific dates without altering your pricing for the entire calendar.  

How to Access Date-Specific Overrides?

Date-specific overrides can be made at three levels – listing, group, or the account level. If you want to create an override for a single listing, you can access the feature through two ways in our ‘Review Prices’ dashboard: 

  1. You can click ‘Add’ in the screenshot shown below. This is available below the sync prices toggle in the Review Prices dashboard.

2. You can select the dates you want to add an override for, and the section will pop, as shown in the video below.

After you’ve specified the dates for which you want the overrides, you have two options in front of you:

  1. Price settings
  2. Stay restrictions

Price Settings

There are different types of overrides that you can apply to your pricing strategies:

  1. Price is the final price that will go out to your OTAs, channel managers, and PMSs. You can add a fixed override or a % override at the listing level. If you apply a fixed price override, then no other customization will be applied to your pricing. If a % change is applied, it will apply on top of other pricing adjustments. Say, for example, for the 4th of July weekend, if you want to add a specific rate for your property due to increased income, you can use this override.
  2. Minimum and maximum prices are the ceiling prices for your property. If you apply a minimum price override, then this price would be the least possible amount for which you can rent your property. This is helpful when you notice a weaker than usual market. In the same way, the maximum price is the highest possible price at which you are willing to get a property. While there is no need to set a cap for this rate, it might be helpful to validate value with price. For example, if you charge exorbitant rates and do not provide value for the money, it might lead to bad reviews. Our pricing recommendations and our customizations maintain these rates as our borders and do not go above or below these rates. You can decide on a fixed override, % override over the base price, or our recommended prices.
Date Specific Overrides - Price Setings

Stay Restrictions

You can apply various minimum stay profiles for your calendar. However, on particular days, you might require a different strategy. You can specify your minimum stay requirement here, and it would override all other customizations with exceptions. Again taking the example of the 4th of July, the weekend did see an increased demand. To face the demand and the upcoming week, you could have had a minimum stay of 4 days. This way, you are booked for the weekend and need not look for another guest at the last minute and prepare for the upcoming week.

Stay restrictions - date-specific overrides

If you’re just starting with PriceLabs, we’ve collated a complete Getting Started Guide to help you with your journey. One important thing to understand when using various 

customizations and these date-specific overrides is that these are applied in a hierarchy. Read more about customizations and date-specific overrides hierarchy here. There might also be a discrepancy between the price in PriceLabs and the one shown on your OTAs, Channel Managers, and PMSs.

Is it important to use all of our customizations and overrides? Not so much. We automatically apply many of these customizations to ensure you get a good deal. You also need to understand your market and listing before making any altercations. Most of these features are advanced features. So, if you dabble with them without properly understanding the feature or your property, you might mess up with your pricing goals.

Why use Date-Specific Overrides?

If we haven’t already sold you on using this advanced feature, we present to you the use cases in which our customers have used the feature. 

Use Case #1

There are various holidays, events, and special occasions. Our algorithm already applies a premium to important days or days when your property is experiencing high demand. Date-specific overrides are an exception to this premium. With experience, you will have your own demand seasons, and we give you control! According to your own demand dates, you can specify your own rates for those specific dates. 

Use case #2

You might have set your max price. Due to the high occupancy and high demand during maybe an unexpected event in your locality, you are already hitting your max price. People are willing to pay extreme prices to stay at your property. You might first want to increase your max price. We would advise you not to do so because you would impact the pricing on other days. A better option would be to add a premium to your base price or even your max price as per your requirements.

Frequently Asked Questions About Date-Specific Overrides

I have applied various overrides, but they are not reflected in my OTA?

After making the custom pricing changes, you should ‘SYNC and REFRESH’ the changes you’ve made in the software. To do this, you should click the ‘sync’ button in the ‘Review Prices’ dashboard. You can check this article for further information: Pricelabs | Sync 

How do I copy date-specific overrides from one group to another group level?

While on the customization page, click on Groups -> All group-level date-specific overrides. Here you will get an option to download the overrides, make changes, and upload them again. You can copy the row with the required date-specific override and change the group name to create a new one. With this, you can download and upload your date-specific overrides for as many groups as possible.

How do I set overrides for 2 years in advance?

Here’s how you can set Date-Specific Overrides 2 years in advance:

  1. Go to Account/ Group level customizations settings
  2. Set your date to 2 years from now (whenever now is for you)

This can be done only on the group or account levels. We can see a calendar up to 2 years from now if you choose it from the dropdown. And one more year by clicking the ‘Next’ button at the top of the calendar. So, totally we can access 3 years of the calendar.

How do I delete a date-specific override?

Here’s how you can delete the Date-Specific Overrides in PriceLabs:

  1. Click on review prices.
  2. Click on your calendar’s black bar on the date you set the override.
  3. Click on remove in the bottom right-hand corner

Let’s say I have a date-specific rate for the 5th and 6th of a month and a booking from the 4th and 5th. Would the software pick the 4th or date-specific rate set for the 5th and 6th or both dates?

Our date-specific overrides will apply to the specific dates selected, so if you select the 5th and 6th and set a flat rate, it will apply a flat nightly rate to those two nights only. If a guest arrives on the 4th and departs on the 6th, only the night of the 5th would have your specified flat rate.

Does PriceLabs pricing always override Airbnb/VRBO changes?

The recommended prices we push will override your daily rates on Airbnb and VRBO. However, any additional promotions or fees, including discounts or service fees, are applied on top of the rates that PriceLabs send. Pricelabs rates will override all the daily rates.

How do I differentiate between each override?

You can specify the reason for each override while setting up these date-specific overrides. This will help you differentiate each override and check why you made each one.

How do you set date-specific minimum stay requirements for things like bank holidays? For example, between 2-5th June, I will only accept 3-night stays.

In these cases, you can use Date-Specific Overrides. Specifically, the stay restrictions feature. Detailed steps to set this up are given in this article – here

In the Group Customizations, when selecting dates on the calendar for overrides, on the Date Specific Override tab in the Stay Restrictions section, you have a newer option, “Enforce Weekly,” that can be enabled – how does this work?

The ‘Enforce weekly’ option is used to repeat the check-in restrictions set for the listing to allow a weekly stay only. This only applies to the users integrated via the VRM channel manager, as that does not support setting up check-out restrictions. So the users who want to have only a weekly stay for their listings can use this feature to set up their restrictions accordingly.

Is there any solution to create a separate season just for holidays- rather than creating a DSO for each individual holiday?

In this case, you can create a custom seasonal profile. Custom Seasonal Profiles let you set different minimum, base, and maximum prices for different seasons throughout the year. This gives you complete control over each listing’s seasonality and demand.

Dynamic pricing in Airbnb refers to the practice of adjusting rental rates in real time based on various factors such as demand, seasonality, local events, and market conditions. This approach allows hosts to optimize their earnings by automatically increasing or decreasing prices to match supply and demand fluctuations. By utilizing data and algorithms, dynamic pricing aims to find the optimal balance between attracting guests and maximizing revenue, ensuring that prices reflect the current market dynamics.
To implement dynamic pricing for vacation rentals, collect relevant data, identify key factors, set pricing rules, use dynamic pricing software, monitor performance, and adjust as needed to optimize revenue.
The aim of dynamic pricing is to optimize revenue and occupancy rates. It is done by adjusting prices in real time based on factors such as demand, market conditions, competition, and other variables. Dynamic pricing softwares seeks to find the optimal balance between attracting guests and maximizing profitability by dynamically setting prices that reflect current market dynamics. The goal is to capture the highest possible value for each booking while ensuring competitiveness in the market.
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