Your Flatmates tools
Setting seasonal pricing rules
Rather than manually adjusting your nightly rate every time demand shifts, Flatmates lets you set seasonal pricing rules that automatically apply a defined rate for specific date ranges, which is a genuinely efficient way to stay competitively priced year-round without needing constant, manual attention.
Find seasonal pricing settings within your pricing tools
Seasonal pricing rules are configured from your listing's pricing settings, typically alongside your base rate and any other pricing tools, letting you define specific date ranges with their own distinct nightly rate.
Map out your known high and low seasons before setting rules
Before configuring anything, use your own understanding of seasonal demand in your city to identify the specific date ranges genuinely worth adjusting, rather than setting arbitrary seasonal boundaries without real backing data or experience.
Set higher rates for confirmed high-demand periods like festive season
For a period like December through early January, set a clearly defined date range with an appropriately higher rate, applied automatically without needing to remember to manually adjust pricing as the season actually approaches.
Use lower or promotional rates deliberately for known quiet periods
For a predictably quieter stretch, a seasonal rule with a modestly reduced rate can help maintain booking volume through a period that would otherwise sit largely empty at your standard, unadjusted rate.
Avoid overlapping date ranges that could create confusing rule conflicts
Check carefully that your seasonal rules don't have overlapping date ranges, since a conflict here can produce unpredictable pricing behaviour - review your full set of rules together as a complete calendar rather than configuring each one in isolation.
Set rules well ahead of the season they actually apply to
Configure a seasonal rule weeks or months before the relevant period begins, capturing early-planning guests who book well in advance, rather than setting the rule reactively once the season has effectively already started.
Review and adjust rules annually based on the previous year's results
After each season passes, check your Insights data for that specific period to see whether the rule actually performed as intended, refining next year's rates based on real results rather than simply repeating the same figures indefinitely.
Combine seasonal rules with your minimum-stay settings thoughtfully
If you also adjust minimum stay requirements seasonally, review both settings together for a given period, since they interact directly and should be configured with a consistent, coordinated strategy rather than independently of one another.
Understand how seasonal rules interact with any dynamic pricing tool
If you're also using a broader dynamic pricing feature, check how it interacts with your manually set seasonal rules, since understanding the priority between the two prevents an unexpected or unintended final price being applied.
Keep a simple personal record of your seasonal rule history
A brief note of what seasonal rates you set in previous years, and how each performed, becomes a genuinely useful reference for refining your approach each time a similar season rolls around again.
This feature turns seasonal strategy into a genuinely passive advantage
Once properly configured, seasonal pricing rules keep working in the background without ongoing manual effort, which means the strategic thinking you do once continues paying off automatically across every future instance of that same season.
Consider shorter, more targeted rules alongside broader seasonal ones
Beyond broad seasonal windows, a short, targeted rule for a specific known event, a concert, a conference, a public holiday weekend, can capture a sharp, brief spike in demand that a broader seasonal rule alone wouldn't be precise enough to fully take advantage of.
Check how seasonal rules display to a guest browsing your listing
Confirm that a guest viewing your calendar during a seasonal-rate period sees pricing that's clear and doesn't look like an error or a glitch, since an unexplained rate jump they weren't expecting can occasionally cause a guest to hesitate or abandon the booking entirely.
Build in a small buffer around the exact edges of a seasonal window
Guests booking a stay that spans just before or after a defined seasonal boundary can create pricing edge cases worth thinking through in advance, so consider whether your rule's exact start and end dates handle these boundary-spanning bookings the way you'd actually intend.
Don't set every season's increase at the same flat percentage by default
Different seasonal periods carry genuinely different demand strength, so resist the temptation to apply the same blanket percentage increase to every seasonal rule purely for simplicity - a period with historically exceptional demand deserves a distinctly different rate from one with only a modest, more marginal seasonal bump.
Keep an eye on how seasonal rules perform relative to competitors
During a defined seasonal window, periodically check how your seasonal rate compares to comparable nearby listings, since competitor pricing can shift seasonally too, and a rule set once at the season's start may need a mid-season adjustment based on how the actual market is behaving.
Seasonal rules are worth setting even for a relatively new listing
Even without a full year of your own historical data yet, setting reasonable seasonal rules based on general local knowledge from the start is better than leaving pricing flat and manually adjusting reactively, since it establishes the habit and infrastructure early, ready to refine as your own data accumulates.
Document the reasoning behind each seasonal rule as you set it
A brief note explaining why you chose a specific rate for a specific period, tied to a particular event or general demand pattern, helps you evaluate afterward whether the underlying reasoning actually held up, rather than just remembering the rate itself without the context behind it.
Coordinate seasonal pricing with any planned maintenance or personal use
Before finalising a seasonal rule for a high-demand window, confirm you don't already have planned maintenance or personal use pencilled in for the same period, since a pricing rule promising availability you can't actually deliver creates an entirely avoidable conflict.
Seasonal pricing rules are worth revisiting whenever your strategy shifts
If your overall approach to hosting shifts, prioritising occupancy over rate, or vice versa, revisit your existing seasonal rules to confirm they still reflect that updated strategy, rather than continuing to run on settings configured under an earlier, different set of priorities.
A well-built set of seasonal rules is a durable, reusable asset
Once genuinely well calibrated, your seasonal pricing rules keep working year after year with only minor annual refinement, making the initial setup effort one of the more durable, reusable investments you can make in your listing's overall pricing strategy.
Combine seasonal rules with a periodic sanity check against reality
Every so often during an active seasonal period, take a moment to confirm the automated rate actually matches what you'd manually choose given current conditions, since an automated rule still benefits from an occasional human sanity check rather than running entirely unsupervised indefinitely.
A short closing thought
Seasonal pricing rules turn a strategy you'd otherwise have to remember and apply manually into something the platform simply handles for you, correctly and consistently, every single time a relevant date range actually arrives again on your calendar each and every single year going forward.
