Unit 4 · Implementing Your Pricing Strategy · Lesson 4.18
Reviewing your implementation
Reviewing a finished implementation has two halves, and most operators only do the first. The calendar tells you whether the numbers you intended actually landed. The market graphs tell you whether those numbers make sense, by plotting your prices against your comp set with occupancy alongside, so you can see whether your position moves with demand.
The full lesson text below is an edited transcript of the video, published 2026-08-24. The complete course is free at the playbook.
Why the review is its own step
The review is the final validation before anything goes live, and it answers two different questions. First, did you achieve the prices your strategy called for? Second, do those prices make sense once plotted against what the market is doing and the occupancy the year actually delivers? Passing the first does not imply passing the second.
Doing this before you push prices to your channels is the whole point. Any gap you find at this stage is still free to fix.
The calendar half
Walk the calendar month by month against your strategy and confirm four things: the hedge and control minimums are in place, the base price leaves room for prices to move rather than pinning them to the floor, the test premium is doing its work further out, and the seasonal ranges have reached the levels you set.
Take time over it. This is where implementation gaps surface, and the most common one is a seasonal range you never got around to adjusting. It is a boring pass and it catches real omissions.
The market half
The calendar cannot tell you whether your prices are sensible, only whether they are the ones you entered. For that, the pricing graph plots your implemented prices as a single line against your comp set’s price bands across the year, so you can watch your position shift relative to competitors as demand changes.
Read it with the occupancy graph in the same view, and with the prior year’s final occupancy displayed, because price position without demand context tells you very little. What you are looking for is correspondence: your line should climb through the comp set’s range where demand is strong and settle lower where it is weak. A price position that stays flat while demand swings is the signal that something in the implementation is not responding.
A correction found this way
On the sample listing the overall shape looked appropriate for demand across the year, with one exception: a single weekend peak at the end of August. Checking those dates on the occupancy graph showed the market had run above 90% occupancy for them a year earlier, which meant there was room to price much closer to the 90th percentile, the top of the market.
The fix was small, an extra 5% on the existing date-specific override for that weekend, and then the graphs were re-read to confirm the increase had landed. That loop, spot the mismatch, adjust, re-read the graph, is the whole method. It is also why the review is worth running on a calendar you are already happy with: this weekend passed the calendar check perfectly, because the numbers were exactly the ones that had been set. Only the market view revealed they were the wrong numbers.