Revenue management, answered

My pricing tool's recommendations look wrong. Should I override them?

Sometimes, but only after you know why they look wrong. A recommendation that offends your instincts is usually one of three things: the tool is sampling listings that are not your real competitors, your settings are quietly constraining it, or your instinct is anchored to last year while the market has moved. Each has a different fix, and blind overrides treat all three the same, which is how operators end up fighting their own tool all year.

By Jack Murphy, Head of Revenue Management at UpRev. Running pricing for US vacation rental managers since 2017. Last updated August 25, 2026.

First, check what the number is built from

Most pricing tools compute recommendations from a sample of nearby listings the tool selected, not from the competitive set you would pick by hand. If the recommendation looks wildly high or low, open the comparison data and look at which properties are actually in the sample. A three-bedroom cabin benchmarked against studio condos will get strange numbers forever. Fixing the comparison set fixes hundreds of future recommendations at once, which is why it should always be the first check, not the override button.

Second, look for the invisible constraints

A calendar that sits flat at one price is rarely the tool failing. It is almost always a price floor doing its job too well: a minimum price set high enough that every recommendation gets clipped to it, or an old fixed-price override still pinned to a date range. If lowering your seasonal prices changes nothing, you are not adjusting the price, you are adjusting a number the floor then ignores. Find the constraint and move it, and the recommendations usually start making sense again.

Third, test your instinct against this year's market

The hardest case is when the tool is right and the operator is wrong. If you were booked at higher rates last year, a lower recommendation feels like an insult. But markets add supply and demand softens, and the honest test is pace: compare how booked your market is today against the same date last year. If the market itself is behind, the tool is reading reality and your memory is reading history. Overriding it back to last year's prices is how calendars go quiet.

When overriding is the right call

Tools are systematically weak at things that live outside their data: a local event the calendar does not know about, a property with genuinely no comparables, the first weeks of a brand-new listing, and the judgment call of how low to go when a date is about to pass unsold. Those are exactly the moments where experienced human judgment should take over, deliberately and date-specifically, rather than as a permanent distrust of every number. The operators who get the best results treat the tool as a fast assistant and reserve their attention for the decisions it cannot make. That division of labor is the entire job of revenue management, and it is why having someone who does it every day tends to beat both blind trust and blanket overrides.