Setting next year's rates: the autumn check for your B&B

Late September is an odd moment in a B&B. The summer has just been processed, the laundry is done, the last invoices have gone out, and it feels like you have earned a breather. That is exactly when someone else starts planning: the guest who wants two weeks with the family next year, or the couple looking for a long weekend in July. Early bookers for summer look around in October, November and January. If your prices for that period are not ready, one of two things happens. Your calendar is closed and the guest books elsewhere. Or your calendar is open with this year's rates and you sell your best nights at a price set twelve months ago.

This article is the autumn check that prevents that. Six steps, two evenings of work, and next year is ready.

Step 1: look back before you look forward

The temptation is to start filling in prices straight away. Do not. First pull three figures per month out of your booking system for the past year:

• Occupancy rate: what percentage of your available nights was sold?
• Average room rate: what did a sold night bring in on average?
• Net per channel: what was left per booking, after commission and payment costs?

Those three together tell you where your price was wrong. A month that was a hundred percent full is not a success but a signal: you were too cheap and you left money on the table. A month at forty percent occupancy with a high rate is the same signal in the other direction. The months you are looking for sit between eighty and ninety percent: that is where your price was roughly right.

How to read those numbers is covered in occupancy, ADR and RevPAR. For the net difference per platform, this calculation helps, because a 120-euro booking through an OTA and a 120-euro direct booking are not the same amount.

Step 2: map out the year before you fill in any prices

Only now do you look ahead, and still without prices. Take an empty calendar for next year and mark:

• Public holidays and long weekends. Watch the ones that move: Easter, Ascension and Whitsun fall differently every year, and a bridge day on a Friday turns an ordinary weekend into a three-night stay.
• School holidays, and not only your own country's. Dutch and German holidays often fall just beside the local ones and fill exactly the weeks you assumed would be quiet.
• Local events: a festival, a cycling race, a trade fair, a big regional celebration. This is the one part where you genuinely know more than any algorithm.
• Your own closures: the weeks you are away or renovating. Block those immediately, before you accidentally sell them.

What is left falls naturally into three kinds of period: peak, shoulder and quiet. That is your price structure, and you have it before entering a single number.

Step 3: three rate levels, not three hundred and sixty-five prices

The most common mistake in this exercise is fiddling day by day. You will not keep it up, and it makes your rates impossible to explain, including to yourself. Work with three base levels: low, medium and high, possibly with a fourth for the real peaks such as New Year's Eve or the weekend of that one festival.

Per level you decide one thing: does the price go up compared to this year, and by how much? An across-the-board increase is rarely right. It makes more sense to raise the periods that were full more firmly and leave the quiet periods unchanged, because there the price is not the problem. How much you can reasonably increase without losing bookings is covered in raising room rates. For the outliers around holidays and events, this article is the companion piece.

Step 4: restrictions belong with the rate, not after it

A rate without restrictions is half a rate. While you are at it, set per period:

• Minimum stay. Two or three nights in high season and around holidays stops a single loose Saturday from blocking your whole weekend. In low season you loosen it, so you can still sell those single nights.
• Arrival and departure days. For a holiday rental a fixed changeover day in summer is often the difference between a full month and a month full of gaps.
• Weekend surcharge or separate weekend rates, if you use them.
• Early booking discount: right now is when it makes sense, because you are publishing rates for people booking eleven months ahead. How to set that up without wrecking your margin is in early bird rates.

Step 5: one source, then publish

Enter your rates, restrictions and availability in your booking system, not in a platform's extranet. Anything you type straight into Booking.com or Airbnb gets overwritten by your own system sooner or later, and then you have lost track. Why that is how it works is explained in one source of truth.

Once everything is in, open the calendar for the period you want to sell. Twelve months ahead is enough for most B&Bs, eighteen if you host a lot of families and groups. The trade-off is in how far ahead to open your calendar.

Then the step most often skipped: check the result as a guest. Search for your own B&B, on one platform and on your own website, and test three dates. A weekend in peak season, a weekday night in low season, and a public holiday. If those three are right, the rest usually is too.

Step 6: write down why you set it that way

This takes five minutes and it is the most underrated part of the exercise. Note in two sentences per period why you chose that price: "July plus eight percent, fully booked by May last year" or "February unchanged, occupancy stays below half". Next autumn you will be at this table again, and that note is the difference between evaluating and guessing all over.

Do it in the right order, not in one sitting

Two evenings are enough, but split them. One evening for the figures and the calendar, one for the rates and restrictions. And start with the twenty percent of your dates that make up most of your revenue: summer, public holidays, long weekends. Those matter most and they sell earliest. The rest can wait until November.

In BedFlow PMS you set prices, minimum stay and availability per period in one calendar, copy a whole season into next year in one move, and the built-in channel manager sends everything to Booking.com, Airbnb, Expedia and your own booking module. The figures from step 1 are in the same system, per month and per channel. How to set it up is in the documentation.

In short

• Early bookers for summer look in autumn. Wait until spring and you sell your best nights at last year's price.
• Start with three figures per month: occupancy, average room rate and net per channel. A hundred percent occupancy is a warning, not a price.
• Mark public holidays, school holidays, events and your own closures first. The price structure follows from those.
• Work with three or four rate levels, not loose daily prices, and raise deliberately where you were full.
• Restrictions belong with the rates: minimum stay, changeover day, weekend surcharge, early booking discount.
• Enter everything in your own system, open the calendar only then, and check the result as a guest.

Want to set next year's rates in one calendar and have them go out to every channel automatically? Try BedFlow PMS free for 30 days, no card details. What it costs afterwards is simply on the pricing page.