Unit 3 · Creating Your Pricing Strategy · Lesson 3.9
Defining your control price
The control price is the minimum you set for the stretch of the booking window when most of the market’s occupancy actually materialises, so it should sit close to what travellers are generally willing to pay. New listings set it from market occupancy and comp set percentiles, positioned just below the percentile that matches expected occupancy. Existing listings with a proven record set it from their own book prices.
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 the control step covers
The control step is the period that carries increased booking activity in the market. It is the mirror image of the hedge step, where the bulk of the market’s bookings have already been made and only limited demand remains. In the control step the bulk of expected market occupancy is still to materialise, which makes it the most crucial of the three stretches, particularly through the low season.
It follows that most of your own expected occupancy should come from this period as well. That is why control prices need to be aligned with what travellers are generally willing to pay: this is the window where the booking activity exists to be captured, and a price sitting outside the range travellers accept forfeits the busiest part of a quiet season.
New listings start from market data
What you are setting is again a pair of minimum prices, one for weekdays and one for weekends, covering the control stretch of the booking window. Because booking activity is heavier here, more of your live prices should end up above those minimums than they did in the hedge step, especially on dates that still hold plenty of remaining demand.
For a new listing the inputs are the market data: market occupancy across your low season, together with your comp set’s prices at each percentile. The strategy sheet turns those into a recommended weekday and weekend figure, and that recommendation reflects a neutral stance. You remain free to go more conservative or more aggressive on your own assessment of the listing.
The tip worth applying to a new listing is to take a price position below the percentile equivalent of the expected occupancy. If the market runs 25% occupancy over the period, the percentile equivalent is the 25th percentile, and the position to aim for is underneath it. Most readings would call that conservative. It is still the right stance for a listing with no track record of its own to justify sitting higher.
A new listing worked through
Take the sample listing whose hedge minimums were already settled at $120 for weekdays and $230 for weekends, copied straight from the sheet’s recommendations. For the control step the sheet recommends $159.51 for weekdays and $258.81 for weekends. Checked against the comp set, the weekday figure lands underneath the 25th percentile and the weekend figure lands level with it.
Copying those across would be perfectly defensible. The example instead goes slightly lower, taking $140 for weekdays and $250 for weekends, which holds the same $110 split between weekday and weekend that the hedge prices used. The effect is that the weekend minimum now sits just underneath the 25th percentile too, which is the tip applied exactly: weekend occupancy over the period ran at about 25%, so the position to take was below its percentile equivalent, the 25th.
None of that is a rule. Depending on how you read your own listing you can follow the recommendation as printed, or move conservative or aggressive from it.
Existing listings weigh your own results
For an existing listing the control price factors in both the market data and your own performance, in the form of your book prices. Those appear in the control price table on the three-step pricing tab of the strategy sheet, which is where your achieved rates for the selected low season are gathered.
Before leaning on them, confirm they are a sound basis for the decision. The test is whether those prices produced decent occupancy through the low season, at or near the percentage the market itself ran. If they did, the prices have already proved themselves and can be carried straight across as your control minimums. If they did not, the honest move is to treat the property as a new listing and work from the market data instead.
An existing listing worked through
The sample existing listing already has its hedge prices defined, and its book rates hold up: the occupancy they produced through the low season was sound, which validates using them. So the control minimums are simply those book prices rounded to the nearest ten, $240 for weekdays and $300 for weekends.
Notice where that lands relative to the sheet. Both figures sit considerably above the recommendations built from market data alone, $159.51 and $258.81. That gap is the whole point of separating existing listings from new ones: a listing with a record of what guests have actually paid can hold a higher minimum than the market averages alone would suggest, because it is working from evidence rather than from the middle of the market.