Unit 4 · Implementing Your Pricing Strategy · Lesson 4.8
Last minute, orphan and day of week pricing
Four automations sit in the general settings: last-minute pricing, orphan day pricing, day of week adjustments, and occupancy-based adjustments. Each already has a default doing real work, which produces the rule that governs all of them: read what the default does before you override it, because switching one on replaces a working behaviour rather than adding to 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.
Read the default first
Every one of these settings is already active in some form when it appears switched off. Last-minute pricing, for example, may be running a gradual 36% discount across the final 16 days, and that default is market-driven, meaning it adjusts itself over time as the tool reassesses conditions.
This is why the percentage you enter is meaningless without the default in front of you. If a default discount is 36% and you want cheaper last-minute prices, your number has to exceed 36%. Switching a setting on and typing a figure lower than the default raises prices, which is the opposite of what the operator usually intends.
Last minute pricing
If you do customise it, avoid a fixed price. A fixed amount replaces every computed price with that one number, ignoring the weekday and weekend distinction entirely; setting 50 as a fixed last-minute price makes every last-minute night 50, which is almost never what anyone means.
Percentage adjustments are the right instrument, as a premium or, far more commonly, a discount. The gradual and flat variants differ more than they look: a gradual discount deepens as the date approaches, while a flat one applies the full percentage across the entire window, so the same number cuts considerably harder as a flat adjustment. Most listings never need to touch this setting, since a discount is already applied by default.
Orphan day pricing
This is the pricing counterpart to the orphan gap stay rule, and it works the same way: an automation that discounts any gap your bookings happen to create. Left off, the tool applies its own discount, typically around 20% for gaps of two nights or less.
Switched on, you can set a discount or premium, as a fixed amount or a percentage, separately for weekdays and weekends, and nominate which gap lengths it applies to. On a sample listing a gap on the 29th and 30th was already cheaper than surrounding dates thanks to the default. Taking the discount to 35% for gaps of two nights or less dropped those two dates further. Same principle as before: 35% only cuts deeper because the default was 20%.
Day of week adjustments
The tool already reads day-of-week trends in the market and prices accordingly, so this setting is for going further: a percentage premium or discount on specific weekdays, negative for a discount and positive for a premium. On a sample listing a 20% Saturday premium and a 10% Sunday discount moved exactly those days.
The caveat is the important part. The adjustment applies to every matching date in the calendar, out to a year ahead. That makes it appropriate only when the pattern genuinely holds all year. A Saturday premium that reflects summer behaviour will also be applied to Saturdays in your low season, where it may be actively harmful.
Occupancy-based adjustments
This is the most advanced of the four and the most useful in principle: automated performance-based pricing, which reads your own occupancy across different lead times and responds. Struggling for occupancy, it holds prices down; as occupancy builds, it pushes them up.
Presets exist, from conservative through to aggressive discounting, and the default profile sits between them and suits most listings. The recommendation during implementation is to leave it switched off so the default applies. There is a sound reason: you are trying to establish whether your own strategy produces the prices you intended, and a second automation moving prices for its own reasons makes that impossible to read. Come back to it once the rest of the configuration is understood and stable.