Unit 2 · Assessing Your Market · Lesson 2.6
Market dashboard price and occupancy trends
The price and occupancy trends section of a market dashboard, in dynamic pricing tools such as PriceLabs, shows where a market’s demand and rates are heading. It holds five components: key future dates, future occupancy with bookings and cancellations, future prices, day of week occupancy and day of week price factor. The two future graphs carry the real decision weight; the day of week charts are averages, useful for pattern spotting only.
The full lesson text below is an edited transcript of the video, published 2026-08-24. The complete course is free at the playbook.
Key future dates
Key future dates are displayed first. The component spotlights a handful of dates whose occupancy percentage runs higher than the dates surrounding them, which is exactly what an emerging high-demand period looks like before it becomes obvious. Spot one early and you can respond while it still matters: raise prices for that window, tighten the minimum stay, or both.
In one example market, the list showed bookings picking up between Christmas and New Year’s well ahead of the dates either side of the holidays. The response writes itself: increase rates and stay requirements for that specific window before the remaining nights sell. The list is a convenient summary, but nothing in it is unique; the same signal can be read straight off the future occupancy chart below it.
Future occupancy, bookings and cancellations
The future occupancy, bookings and cancellations graph shows the current occupancy for each date, together with the changes from booking and cancellation activity over the last 7, 14 or 30 days, whichever filter is applied. The timeline can be stretched or narrowed at will, from a microscopic view of a single day to the entire period at once, and the same data can be downloaded as a CSV for anyone who prefers working in a spreadsheet.
What to look for is the occupancy, booking and cancellation situation on a specific date or across a specific period: potential high and low demand periods, peak-demand days such as Christmas, Thanksgiving, football matches, university graduations or any other local event, and midweek versus weekend behaviour. One limitation to keep in mind: pickup and cancellations are only represented for the last 30 days. Scroll further into the past and the graph shows occupancy alone, which is still enough for year-over-year analysis and for predicting how much demand is likely still to come.
Reading a real market
Viewed holistically, one example market makes the patterns easy to see. Occupancy runs low through November, December and January, and June through August is always the peak season. A few individual dates stand well above their neighbours; in this market the spikes lined up with Thanksgiving and Presidents Day. Weekend demand runs ahead of weekday demand, especially in the off-season. In the peak season the gap narrows, because guests are typically staying 7 or 14 nights, and a stay that long covers weekdays whether the guest prefers them or not.
For recent dates the graph also shows market pickup, meaning how much of the current occupancy was generated in the last 30 days, and cancellations can be brought into view as well. In this market the cancellation volume was significant, which is worth knowing before treating booked nights as final. Reading the graph fluently takes some practice, and it is usually read alongside the future prices graph when decisions are being made.
Future prices
The future prices graph shows how nightly rates, excluding fees, are being set across the area for future dates, and it reaches into the past as well. Shaded bands represent the range of prices at the top, middle and bottom of the market, so the graph answers not just what the price situation is on a date or period, but where in the market’s range those prices sit. A median booked price can be overlaid too, though median prices are not necessarily helpful when it comes to decision making.
In sophisticated markets there is often a correlation between the future occupancy and future prices graphs: high demand periods and peak days generally see higher rates, at least in some parts of the market, and the same applies to weekend versus midweek pricing. The example market bears this out. Where occupancy peaks, in the high seasons and again around Presidents Day, prices rise too, most visibly in the 90th percentile, the top of the market where premium prices are fetched. Far-future dates behave slightly differently, simply because little occupancy exists there yet; looking historically, the pattern is clear: prices go high when demand periods go high.
The graph also lets you isolate segments. Interested only in the higher end of the market? The lower price bands can be hidden so that only the top price points remain, just as pickup or cancellations can be removed from the occupancy graph. These two future graphs together are the most relevant part of the section when assessing a market or working on a pricing strategy, and both reward deliberate practice.
The day of week graphs
The day of week occupancy graph shows the average occupancy for each weekday in the market, across either the last 30 or 360 days. It can surface patterns such as weekends running more occupied than weekdays: in the example market, Wednesday sat at 49% occupancy against 59% for Fridays and Saturdays. That gap is modest, and in other markets it can be far more pronounced.
The day of week price factor graph does the same for price, showing the average base price for each weekday across the last 30 or 360 days. Weekends priced above weekdays is the pattern to look for; in the example market, pricing stayed flat across the entire week, which is not the mark of a sophisticated market. Both graphs share the same caveat: they are built on averages only, so they are useful for orientation and pattern spotting, not something a pricing strategy should rely on.