Unit 4 · Implementing Your Pricing Strategy · Lesson 4.11
Date specific overrides
A date-specific override is the last resort that becomes a workhorse: it overrides prices and restrictions for dates you select, for when no other setting produces what you want. The craft is in the combination, a percentage adjustment on the price so the tool keeps reacting to demand, with a fixed floor underneath it.
The full lesson text below is an edited transcript of the video, published 2026-08-24. The complete course is free at the playbook.
What it is for
An override replaces previously set prices or customisations for the specific dates you select. It is the tool you reach for when every other customisation has failed to produce the prices you want, and it suits short ranges rather than long ones. In practice it is the natural instrument for seasonal prices, either instead of a seasonal profile or layered on top of one.
Percentage on the price, fixed on the floor
The override offers a price field plus a minimum and a maximum, each settable as a fixed amount or a percentage, and the recommended combination is deliberate. Use a percentage on the price, because a fixed amount produces a static price: it pins those dates and stops the tool adjusting them as demand shifts, which is the entire reason for using a dynamic tool. A percentage keeps that responsiveness while moving the level.
Use a fixed amount for the minimum, because it saves you computing a moving target. Your far-out minimums change as booking windows shift, so a percentage floor would be calculated against a number that does not stay still.
Set that floor below the price you actually want. The point is to leave the tool room to reduce prices if demand disappoints, while still protecting a date whose market prices run above average. The maximum is worth adding only if the resulting prices still come out too high, and usually a smaller percentage on the price handles that instead.
A worked override
On a sample listing carrying a 150 floor and a 278 base, two dates late in January needed lifting: the current prices were 194 and 195, and the target was around 250, which is roughly a 28% increase. The override went in as a 28% adjustment with a fixed 220 minimum for those two dates.
After saving, both dates sat close to the intended 250 with 220 showing as their threshold. Worth noting what the numbers demonstrate: the override moved the level while leaving the dates free to move with demand, and the 220 floor sits comfortably below the 250 target, which is what gives the tool room to reduce without collapsing the price.
Restrictions inside an override
An override can also carry a minimum stay, and it overrides whatever stay rules your customisations hold for those dates. The constraint to remember is that it is a single value with no variable-rule option, so it cannot relax as arrival approaches. That makes it important to set it against the actual stay trends for those specific dates rather than reaching for your strictest rule. On the sample listing, updating the same two January dates to a four-night requirement replaced the two-night default.
Check-in and check-out restrictions are available here too, subject as always to whether your channel manager supports them.
The three settings that make overrides manageable
Day-of-week filtering applies an override only to chosen days inside the selected range, which matters once a range runs longer than a couple of weeks. On the sample listing, a 15% discount with a 130 floor and relaxed one-night stays was applied across the last two weeks of January, then restricted to Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays only.
Copying to an additional range applies the same override to other dates without rebuilding it, and it accepts several ranges at once. The same discount was copied onto a mid-February window in one step.
The most valuable of the three is the expiration. It sets a lead time at which the override is removed, after which your original prices and restrictions return. That turns an override into a reversible experiment: if higher prices and tighter restrictions have not worked by the time the date is close, the configuration reverts on its own instead of quietly holding an unsold date at an ambitious price. Note that an expiration set on one override applies only to that one, so copying it to other ranges is how you extend it.