How to Optimize Your STR Pricing for Shoulder Season

What Makes Shoulder Season Different

Welcome back to Get Paid for Your Pad. We're in the second or third week of August, and in a lot of markets shoulder season has just started. In some markets it starts a little later around Labor Day weekend, but typically when schools go back in the second week of August, that's where you start seeing weekday occupancy begin to drop. Every week it drops a little bit lower, and that's really the start of the shoulder season in most markets.

There are four seasons in our pricing strategy: low season, shoulder season, high season, and peak season. In this episode I want to focus on shoulder season, because shoulder season is actually pretty tricky to price.

Low season is straightforward: get as many bookings as you can, don't worry too much about price. Put your most competitive prices in advance and try to fill your units. Even slightly reducing your ADR to drive high occupancy makes sense because the extra visibility and momentum on the OTAs pays off later. Low season is really about maximizing occupancy.

High season and peak season are the opposite. It's about maximizing ADR and controlling your pacing, making sure you don't get booked too far in advance at prices that are too low. If you start pacing ahead, you raise prices. If you fall behind, you lower them. Pretty straightforward.

Shoulder season is trickier. The weekends can still be strong but they vary a lot. The difference between a weekday and a weekend is very large. You have to look at your weekday pricing versus your weekend pricing very carefully, and there's a lot of variety between the different weeks.

How to Define Your Four Seasons

We use occupancy to define our seasons. As a general guideline:

Peak season is occupancy consistently above 90%. The whole market is pretty much going to sell out. That's where you get really elevated ADRs and a lot of volatility in price. It's also the only time a last-man-standing strategy can work, where you keep prices elevated last minute because there's very little inventory left.

High season is 70 to 90% occupancy.

Shoulder season is 50 to 70%.

Low season is anything below 50%.

These numbers don't always work out perfectly. You might have a low season where occupancy goes slightly above 50%, or a high season weekend that dips below 70%. Don't overcomplicate it. Apply the right strategy for the season and adjust as needed.

Reading Your Occupancy Graph: Smoky Mountains Example

To define your seasons, look at the future occupancy graph in your market dashboard. This graph shows current occupancy on the books for the next 12 months, along with occupancy last year final, pickup rate, and cancellation rate.

I'm looking at the Smoky Mountains here. In summer, July and August, occupancy is very high. January and February are the low point. Spring break kicks things back in. And there are a couple of weeks in October when schools are out where occupancy is also very high.

Right now in mid-August, looking ahead into September, the weekends peak around 70 to 75%. Labor Day weekend hits higher than that but doesn't quite break 90%, so it's high season, not peak. You want to cut that out in your seasonal profile because it behaves differently from the surrounding shoulder weeks.

September and early October show weekends above 70% and weekdays dropping below 50%, so on average you're still in that 50 to 70% shoulder range. Then early October schools go out and occupancy spikes to 90 to 95% on weekends, 75% on weekdays. That's high season.

November drops back to shoulder. Early December has weekdays dipping into the thirties and weekends still above 75%, which is a heavy swing and still shoulder season, but you'd want strong day-of-week adjustments. Christmas week goes peak, then it drops steeply after New Year's Day into true low season, staying low until spring break.

Setting Up Custom Seasonal Profiles in PriceLabs

Why bother with seasonal profiles if PriceLabs already factors in seasonality? Because PriceLabs handles seasonality generally but doesn't adjust based on how you're actually pacing. Typically, low season gets priced a little too high and high season a little too low. Shoulder season gets especially tricky with the weekday-weekend gap. Custom seasonal profiles let you fine-tune all of that.

In PriceLabs, go to Customizations and find the Custom Seasonal Profile section. Click Apply, then Edit Profile.

Your first choice is percentage change or fixed pricing. Percentage is usually the right call if you have a larger portfolio where units share similar characteristics. Fixed pricing only makes sense if you have a small number of unique units and want to set specific minimum and base prices for each.

Set your date range. For a shoulder season block running August 9 through September 3, for example, you'd cut out Labor Day weekend because it behaves differently.

From there you can adjust minimum price, base price, max price, minimum night stay profile, check-in and checkout profile, and a custom pricing profile with any of PriceLabs' other settings like last-minute discounts, occupancy-based adjustments, orphan day pricing, and day-of-week multipliers.

Day-of-Week Pricing for Shoulder Season

In shoulder season, a day-of-week multiplier almost always makes sense. You're seeing weekends still strong but weekdays dropping. A typical setup for shoulder season might look like this:

Tuesday and Wednesday: minus 20%. These are your lowest-demand days.
Monday: minus 15%.
Thursday and Sunday: minus 10%. These days see a bit more travel than mid-week.
Friday and Saturday: a small positive markup to capture the remaining weekend demand.

The exact numbers depend on your portfolio. The point is that you can build a seasonal profile that applies these multipliers only during your defined shoulder season dates, while keeping your high season and low season profiles set differently.

The Minimum Stay Trap

A lot of operators try to solve the shoulder season weekday problem by requiring longer minimum stays on weekends, hoping to force guests to book into the surrounding days. I don't like this strategy.

Most demand in shoulder season is for short stays, typically Friday through Sunday or Thursday through Sunday. If you require a four-night minimum, you're cutting out most of the market. Even if some of those weekday nights remain empty, you'll likely earn more from a higher ADR two-night weekend booking than from a long forced stay at a lower rate.

The better approach: offer weekdays at genuinely low prices. If Thursday or Sunday is priced cheaply enough, a lot of guests will add a night on their own, whether to check in early or check out late, without you forcing them. You capture the extra night without cutting out demand.

Keep Your Strategy Simple

PriceLabs gives you a lot of customization options. That's powerful, but it's also a trap.

Only add complexity if you're very confident it will increase revenue. The challenge I see with some operators is they make their strategy so complicated that nobody can understand anymore why prices are where they are. If you can't explain your own pricing strategy, that's a problem.

One practical tip: once you've built a seasonal profile, you can download it as a CSV. You can then upload that CSV to other units without starting from scratch. You can also build the CSV directly in Excel or use Claude to generate multiple seasonal profiles at once. I used Claude to build 20 seasonal profile CSVs for one client, which would have taken three or four hours manually.

Wrapping Up

Define your seasons using your occupancy graph. Build custom seasonal profiles in PriceLabs for shoulder season with day-of-week multipliers that reflect the weekday-weekend swing. Don't force minimum stays that cut out demand. And keep your strategy simple enough that you can actually understand it.

If you want us to help you set this up, go to freewyldfoundry.com/get-started. We'll build a free revenue report for your portfolio and show you where the opportunities are.

See you next week.