Unit 4 · Implementing Your Pricing Strategy · Lesson 4.10
Advanced pricing customisations
The advanced settings are a mix of genuinely useful controls and ones best left alone. Redefining which days count as your weekend and discounting the dates adjacent to bookings both earn their place. Blanket pricing offsets and price smoothing deserve caution, because one ignores your thresholds and the other flattens demand you should be pricing for.
The full lesson text below is an edited transcript of the video, published 2026-08-24. The complete course is free at the playbook.
Which days are your weekend
By default a pricing tool treats Friday and Saturday as the weekend, because those nights usually carry the better occupancy and the higher rates. Some markets do not behave that way. Where the booking data shows Thursdays or Sundays running occupancy similar to the true weekend, particularly where longer stays dominate, those days can be added to the weekend definition.
Do it deliberately, because the change is not cosmetic. It applies across the whole calendar and every weekend-specific setting follows it: your weekend minimum price and your weekend stay rules will all begin applying to the days you added.
Demand sensitivity
This dial governs how strongly current booking activity moves your prices, as opposed to seasonality, which is the same idea applied to the calendar. Dates seeing active booking movement get pushed up; quiet dates get held down. A recommended profile applies even with the setting off, and switching it on allows a low or high sensitivity profile, or none.
On a pricing graph the effect mirrors the seasonality dial: low sensitivity produces subdued movement across the year, high sensitivity produces sharp swings. As with seasonality, the default suits most booking patterns and this is a setting to touch only when there is a reason.
Far out prices
The far-out premium is the mirror of last-minute pricing, applying to distant dates instead of imminent ones, and it is the instrument that implements test-step pricing. You define the lead time at which it starts, whether it is a discount or premium, and whether it applies flat or gradually.
The default is market-driven and worth reading before you change it, typically a gradual adjustment of around 20% starting a couple of months out. On the sample listing the default was a gradual 20% premium after 60 days spread across 113 days; taking it to 60% over the same window visibly lifted the April prices against an unchanged copy of the same listing.
Offsets and adjacent dates
A pricing offset applies a blanket premium or discount, fixed or percentage, on top of everything else you have configured. Its legitimate uses are narrow: absorbing channel-specific commission, much as an offset in a channel manager would, or supporting a parent-child listing arrangement. Use it for anything else and it becomes a source of confusion, because the calendar then shows post-offset prices and the offset disregards the thresholds you set. A floor you trust is no longer a floor.
The adjacent factor is the more interesting control. It adjusts dates sitting immediately beside booked or blocked dates, with the usual practice being a discount, to improve the chance they sell before they strand. You choose the adjustment, how far from the booking it reaches, and whether weekends are included. With the 23rd and 24th blocked on a sample listing, the 22nd and 25th became adjacent dates and a 40% discount within one day of a reservation brought both down. Where an orphan policy cures a gap after it appears, this tries to stop the gap forming at all.
Rounding and smoothing
Two settings finish the list, neither of them recommended. Rounding pushes computed prices to whole numbers, with control over the digits, which can be useful for monitoring and changes nothing substantive.
Smoothing is the one to avoid. It sets identical prices across a defined stretch, averaging what the other customisations produced. That is directly at odds with the point of the exercise: demand varies date to date even inside a single week, and different prices are the correct response. Smoothing takes a calendar that had learned to differentiate and flattens it back out.