Unit 3 · Creating Your Pricing Strategy · Lesson 3.7
Selecting your low season
Your low season is the stretch of the year when your market’s occupancy runs lowest, and it anchors the whole pricing strategy: the minimum prices come from it. Find it by reading finalised occupancy for the trailing year in your market dashboard, confirm it in the strategy sheet, and when several date ranges qualify, choose the one that yields the lowest hedge, control and test recommendations.
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 a low season is
A low season is any period of the year in which a market runs lower-than-average occupancy. Hospitality sometimes calls it the lean season: a stretch with little booking activity, usually owing to unfavourable weather or a lack of events in the area.
Those periods typically come with lower market rates as well. That is not a coincidence; it is the market reacting to weak demand, discounting in an attempt to entice bookings that are not arriving on their own. Low occupancy and low prices travelling together is exactly what makes the low season worth finding, because the pricing strategy is built up from it.
Reading the occupancy graph
The search happens in your market dashboard with the comp set you built for your listing applied, so the data describes the market you actually compete in. The graph to read is the future occupancy chart in the dashboard’s price and occupancy trends, which can plot occupancy several ways: what is currently on the books, what was on the books at the same point a year earlier, and the finalised occupancy the market ended at across the prior 365 days.
For selecting a low season, the finalised line is the one that matters. On-the-books occupancy for future dates is still filling in, so it understates every date and hides the seasonal shape; the finalised line shows what each part of the year genuinely settled at. Scan it for a stretch of dates that sits clearly below the rest of the year.
Once a candidate stands out, note its start and end dates, remembering that the line reflects the prior year, so the dates you record are prior-year dates. In the sample market, the trough ran from April 18 to May 17.
Confirming the dates in the sheet
With the PriceLabs market exports loaded into the strategy sheet, enter the start and end dates on the three-step pricing tab. The occupancy and price figures for the selected period recalculate, and the confirmation you want is a very low average occupancy across both weekdays and weekends. In the sample market both came back far below the rest of the year, which is the signature of a genuine low season.
When several ranges qualify
In your own market you may find more than one candidate: different quiet ranges scattered through the year, or a choice between a past window and the same window in the future. What you are after is the combination of low occupancy and low prices, because these dates become the basis for your minimum prices. Low occupancy alone is not enough.
You can weigh candidates by reading the occupancy and pricing graphs in the market dashboard side by side, but the strategy sheet offers a simpler route. Its recommendations already take both market occupancy and market prices into account, so whichever set of dates yields the lowest recommendations through the hedge, control and test steps is your low season.
A worked comparison shows how that plays out. Put April 18 to May 17 against September 5 to October 10 and the occupancy averages settle quickly in favour of the April window, which runs lower on both weekdays and weekends. Pricing is less straightforward, with the lower prices trading places between the two windows depending on the percentile. The recommendations resolve it: the April dates yield lower results through all three of the hedge, control and test steps, so they are the ones to use.
Past dates versus future dates
The other common fork is between a past window and the same window ahead of you. Prices further in the future tend to sit higher, as is typical of short-term rentals, and they drift toward where the market really lands as the dates approach. Past dates are therefore more indicative of where prices end up, which is what minimum pricing needs.
Comparing the two fairly takes one adjustment: shift the future window a couple of days so the days of the week line up, a range that starts on a Tuesday and ends on a Wednesday in both versions. Because its dates are ahead, the future sheet also fills in the prior-year and expected occupancy for the period, and those figures prove the alignment: in the sample market the past window’s occupancy of 7.58% on weekdays and 25.79% on weekends matched the prior-year market occupancy shown for the future window exactly.
The prices then tell the real story. With the future window still around five and a half months away, its market prices sat considerably higher than the finalised past window, and the hedge, control and test recommendations rose with them. The past dates were the clearer choice, and the general lesson holds: past dates, being closer to where the market actually settles, usually make the better basis for a low season.