How rate suggestions are worked out

You don't need this article to use rate suggestions — but pricing advice is easier to act on when you know where it comes from. Here's the engine, in operator's terms.

It starts from your price

Every suggestion begins at the base rate you set for the room type. The engine adjusts around your number — it never invents one of its own, and it never crosses the minimum and maximum you've set. Those two rails are applied last, after everything else, so nothing can break through them.

What moves the price

• How full the date is. A nearly-sold-out date firms up; a genuinely soft one eases. For a room type with only one or two units, a single booking would swing its own occupancy wildly, so the engine leans on the surrounding dates and the property as a whole to steady the signal.
• How the date is selling against your own history. A date booking ahead of its usual curve firms up — and there's a hard rule behind it: a date that's outselling last year is never discounted, full stop.
• Shopper interest. Searches for those dates on your own booking page count as demand — and they only ever push a suggestion up, never down.
• Close-in soft dates. An unsold night loses all its value at midnight. As a soft date gets close, a modest discount can help fill it — discounts appear only close in, and only when the date is genuinely soft.
• Day of week. Weekend nights carry a premium — Friday and Saturday by default, adjustable to your market.

A far-out date isn't "soft"

A date six months away is mostly empty. That's not weakness — that's normal. The engine knows, from your own booking history, how booked your property typically is at that distance, and judges each date against its own curve: ahead or behind, not empty or full. That's why the reason on a far-out date reads like "25% booked — typically 38% this far out", instead of treating every distant date as a discount case.

Calibrated to your property, not a textbook

What counts as "busy" is learned from your own history — a property that averages 60% occupancy has a different definition of full than one that averages 90%. You can also tell the engine to ignore periods that would distort the picture, like a renovation or a closure, so an odd year doesn't skew this one's advice.

Why it suggests instead of auto-changing

Because the engine reads bookings and searches, and you read everything else — the weather, the event that just got announced, the group that books the same week every year. Keeping the final click yours means a wrong suggestion costs a glance, not a weekend of mispriced rooms. And when you do agree, applying is one click.