Revenue management, answered

Am I leaving money on the table because of a lack of pricing sophistication and strategy?

Almost certainly yes. Most property management companies set rates reactively, not strategically. Without a deliberate pricing framework covering demand segmentation, lead-time rules, and length-of-stay controls, you are consistently underpricing high-demand periods and overpricing slow ones.

By Jack Murphy, Head of Revenue Management at UpRev. Running pricing for US vacation rental managers since 2017.

Where the Gaps Usually Show Up

The most common revenue leaks are flat weekend premiums that ignore true local demand curves, minimum stay restrictions that block bookings without protecting revenue, and last-minute rate drops that train guests to wait you out. Each of these is a pricing decision, and leaving them to default settings or gut feel costs real money across a portfolio. A systematic audit of your booking window patterns and occupancy by day-of-week will surface these gaps quickly.

Strategy Beats Reaction Every Time

Reactive pricing means you are always responding to what already happened rather than positioning inventory ahead of demand. A proper revenue strategy sets rate floors and ceilings by property tier, builds orphan-gap rules to protect shoulder nights, and uses comp-set monitoring to keep your portfolio positioned correctly in the market. Operators who shift from reactive to strategic typically see improvement across both occupancy and average daily rate, not just one or the other.

What to Do Right Now

Pull your trailing twelve months of booking data and look at where you had high occupancy paired with low ADR. Those windows are your clearest evidence of underpricing. Then review any periods with low occupancy and low ADR together, which often signals a minimum stay or rate-drop policy working against you. Those two analyses alone will show you exactly where a more disciplined pricing approach would have changed your results.