Stop Guessing Prices: Build a Real Revenue Management Routine

Jasper Ribbers:

What’s up, welcome back to Get Paid For Your Pad. Today we’re diving into a RevUp episode, and we’re talking about revenue management cadences. You can call them routines, rhythms, or processes. What matters is what you should be doing daily, weekly, and monthly to manage your revenue properly.

This episode is for anyone managing revenue, whether you’re a dedicated revenue manager or you’re handling pricing for your own portfolio.

I want to start with a bit of context. Through our Freewyld Foundry Revenue & Pricing Management service, we review a lot of portfolios. We create free revenue reports and speak directly with operators about how they currently manage pricing. Because of that, we have a very clear view of what most hosts are actually doing.

What we consistently see is that most operators are not spending enough time on revenue management. The main reason is simple. They don’t have a process. They don’t know exactly what to do, when to do it, or how to structure their time. There’s no rhythm. There’s no calendar block. And without that, revenue management always gets pushed aside.

Today, I want to give you a very simple process you can follow to establish that cadence in your business.

Before we get into tactics, the first step is making time. Revenue management is not something you do only when everything else is quiet. In this industry, there is always something coming up. If you don’t intentionally block time in your calendar, it won’t happen.

For an average portfolio, somewhere between 20 and 50 listings, the absolute minimum is about 15 to 30 minutes per day. If you have a larger portfolio, that number should be closer to 30 to 60 minutes. Even for smaller portfolios, 15 minutes a day is the minimum if you want to have any kind of control.

Open your calendar and block that time. Label it clearly as revenue management. If it’s not scheduled, it won’t become a habit.

Now the next question is what you actually do during that time.

The first thing you want to do is open everything you need. Your pricing tool, Airbnb, Booking.com, your PMS. You want all of it open before you start, because reviewing bookings often leads you to check settings, rules, or pricing configurations.

Once everything is open, you start by reviewing bookings that came in since the last time you checked.

Every single booking matters. Revenue management is full of uncertainty. You never know the perfect price. Because of that, booking data is one of the most valuable sources of information you have. A booking represents a real person who chose your listing over all others in the market. That decision tells you something about your pricing.

Not all bookings are equally informative. For example, if you see several two-night weekend bookings coming in close to arrival, that’s expected. There’s usually less to learn from those.

But when you see bookings far in advance, early in the booking window, those are much more interesting. An early booking can indicate that you are priced too competitively too far out, or it can signal upcoming demand.

I recently saw bookings coming in for early September, which was unusual. It turned out a music festival had just been announced. There is no perfect system to track every event in your market. One of the best indicators that something is happening is an unexpected early booking.

When that happens, you should investigate. Use Google. Use ChatGPT. Look up what’s happening on those dates. If nothing obvious is going on, then you look deeper at the booking itself. Is it a repeat guest? Is it a longer stay? Over time, this daily review builds real intuition about your market.

Bookings can also reveal configuration mistakes. For example, if you receive a one-night booking two months out, and you don’t want those, that means something is wrong in your setup. Pricing tools, PMS settings, and OTA rules interact in complex ways. It’s easy to accidentally allow bookings you didn’t intend to allow.

If you don’t catch those bookings early, entire peak weekends can fill with suboptimal stays before you even realize there’s an issue.

That’s why reviewing every booking, every day, is so important.

The time this takes will vary. Some days it’s five minutes. Other days it’s thirty. It depends on how many bookings you have and how much information they contain.

The second daily check is looking at booking concentration. If you receive many bookings for a single unit in a short period of time, that’s a strong signal. Often, it means you’re underpriced. In some cases, it could also indicate a pricing mistake.

Bookings will always show you when something is off.

Next, you look at last-minute inventory. Review the next seven days. Are there gaps? Are your prices already at minimums? Do you need to make small temporary adjustments to improve visibility?

Weekends deserve special attention. In many markets, weekdays are hard to book, but weekends still carry opportunity. If it’s early in the week and your weekend is still empty, small price adjustments can help trigger visibility on OTAs.

Your pricing tool already applies last-minute discounts, but tools don’t understand nuance. Some weekends are weaker than others. By reviewing this daily, you learn when price changes actually move the needle and when they don’t.

Over time, this builds experience. There is no shortcut for this. You cannot replace daily observation with dashboards alone.

At a minimum, these two daily tasks matter most: reviewing bookings and checking last-minute inventory.

On a weekly basis, pacing becomes the priority.

The most important KPI to review is Market Penetration Index, or MPI. MPI compares your occupancy to the occupancy of comparable listings in your market.

If your occupancy is 30 percent and the market is at 15 percent, your MPI is 200 percent. That means you’re pacing far ahead.

In low season, that can be acceptable. In high season, it usually means you’re underpriced.

You should review MPI for every unit over your relevant booking window. That could be 30, 60, or 90 days, depending on your market and how far out guests typically book.

You want to choose an MPI range that reflects real demand, without distortion from owner blocks or unavailable dates.

When you review pacing, the goal isn’t to immediately lower prices if a unit is behind. Pricing is not always the problem. It could be reviews, listing content, distribution, or even outdated information in the description.

I once found a unit underperforming because the description still mentioned nearby construction that had already finished. That single line was killing demand.

When a unit is pacing ahead, the reason is almost always pricing. The question then becomes whether that’s intentional.

If you decide to adjust prices, make small changes. Five to ten percent is usually enough. Give it time to see the effect. Overcorrecting creates a yo-yo effect where calendars fill too quickly and then stall.

Once a week is the right cadence for pacing adjustments. Daily changes at that level create noise.

On a portfolio level, you should also review pacing. Look at how the entire portfolio is pacing across upcoming months. You may be ahead in one period and behind in another. That helps guide broader strategy without blindly changing every unit.

Peak demand dates deserve special attention. Events, holidays, graduations, and seasonal peaks require higher minimum prices, not just higher rates. If a cancellation happens close to arrival and your minimum price is too low, last-minute discounts can destroy revenue.

Minimum prices on peak dates should be significantly higher than normal. This protects you from late cancellations and preserves upside.

If you follow this daily and weekly process consistently, you will learn faster than any course or tool can teach you. Over time, this experience compounds into better decisions and higher revenue.

Block the time. Follow the routine. Let the data teach you.

That’s it for today. If you’re looking for help with revenue management, we offer free revenue reports at freewyldfoundry.com. We’ll review your portfolio, walk through your current process, and show you where improvements are possible.

Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.