Revenue management, answered

Should I round my nightly rates, and does smoothing prices across adjacent days help?

Yes to rounding, and yes to smoothing when done deliberately. Rounded rates look intentional and convert better on listing pages. Smoothing adjacent days prevents cliff-edge pricing that creates orphan gaps and confuses guests comparing nearby dates.

By Jack Murphy, Head of Revenue Management at UpRev. Running pricing for US vacation rental managers since 2017. Last updated September 1, 2026.

Rounding: Keep It Clean and Consistent

Odd rates like $213 or $187 signal guesswork to guests scanning search results. Round to the nearest five or ten dollars as a standard practice across your portfolio. The precision looks arbitrary rather than strategic, and clean numbers tend to anchor perceived value better. Pick a rounding convention and apply it uniformly so your pricing has a coherent feel across a property's calendar.

Smoothing: Protect Your Gap Nights

When a Thursday sits at a dramatically different rate than Wednesday and Friday, you create booking patterns that leave single-night gaps you cannot fill at any reasonable price. The goal of smoothing is to keep adjacent nights within a sensible band of each other so demand flows naturally across the week. Review your calendar weekly and flag any date where the rate jumps or drops sharply relative to its neighbors. Correcting those spikes before they strand gap nights is one of the clearest yield-protection moves a manager can make.

Where Managers Get This Wrong

The biggest mistake is smoothing too aggressively and flattening legitimate demand signals, like a high-demand Saturday surrounded by weaker shoulder nights. Smoothing should reduce harmful cliffs, not eliminate the premium your data supports. Treat it as a quality-control step that runs after your base rate logic is set, not as a substitute for sound rate-setting discipline.