Unit 4 · Implementing Your Pricing Strategy · Lesson 4.4
Minimum, maximum and base price
Three settings sit above every other pricing control: a minimum, a maximum and a base price. Understanding them means understanding how a nightly rate is actually built, because a dynamic tool computes each date in layers, starting from your base price and finishing with your thresholds. The layer order is what makes the rest of the configuration predictable.
The full lesson text below is an edited transcript of the video, published 2026-08-24. The complete course is free at the playbook.
How a nightly price is built
A dynamic pricing tool does not store a price for each date. It computes one, in layers, and reading a single date’s breakdown shows the whole stack. It begins with your base price. Market factors are applied to that, for seasonality and demand on that specific date. Your own customisations are applied next. Your thresholds are applied last.
A worked breakdown makes the order concrete. Starting from a base at 355, market factors and customisations pulled the computed figure down, and the final price landed at 166 because a 140 floor stopped it going lower. The threshold acted last, which is exactly why thresholds are the reliable part of a configuration: whatever the layers above them produce, the floor holds.
The minimum is your floor
The minimum is the primary threshold, the price floor beneath your listing. Once set, only a small number of things can override it: a fixed last-minute price, or a separate minimum inside a seasonal profile or a date-specific override. Nothing else gets underneath it.
In the implementation this field carries your hedge weekday price, the absolute cheapest position you intend to take anywhere. On a sample listing where several upcoming weekdays were computing below the level the operator was willing to accept, entering a 150 floor lifted exactly those dates to 150 and left everything else untouched. That is the signature of a floor working: it changes the dates that breached it and nothing more.
The maximum is optional
The maximum is the ceiling, overridable only by a seasonal profile or a date-specific override. Unlike the floor, it is not a crucial setting and can reasonably be left blank.
Its legitimate use is narrow: tapering outlier prices, or reining things in when the tool pushes rates higher than is reasonable after every other setting has already been adjusted. On the sample listing a 400 ceiling capped a handful of February dates that had computed above it. Reach for it as a corrective, not as part of the standard setup.
The base price drives everything above the thresholds
The base price is the number the whole stack starts from, which makes it the lever that moves your entire calendar at once. Lowering it on the sample listing dropped every date, pushing many onto the 150 floor and revealing that the tool would have gone lower still without that floor in place. Raising it sharply lifted everything and pushed more dates into the ceiling.
Pricing tools do recommend a base price, and relying on that recommendation alone is a mistake, because the base price has a job in your implementation that the recommendation knows nothing about: aligning your computed prices with the strategy you decided. Choosing it is therefore a question of what value produces the prices you want, not what value the market suggests in the abstract.