Should I use 'nightly rates' or 'weekly rates'?

23rd February 2022

OK, you're at the stage of needing to set prices. You can choose either 'nightly prices' or 'weekly prices'.

Should I use 'nightly rates' or 'weekly rates'?

Nightly Price:

We charge a 1.5% commission for owners using nightly rates. (We add a service fee of on top of the price your enter typically ≈14%)

Using a nightly price model, you can set a price for each night of the year. The other control you have is to set a minimum stay, eg, 2 nights. 

You need to be able to control these rates from your own login, as we don't tend to make changes to prices from our admin team to nightly prices. The owner can quickly change the nightly rates from their login.

You'll receive more bookings of shorter stays, e.g. 2-3 night bookings will be more typical. This will result in more changeovers during the week and more calendar gaps but higher prices per night. This might suit some owners better.

Weekly rates:

We charge the owner 16% commission for the owner using weekly rates. 

We tend to encourage owners to use this option, as it's quick to copy from a similar property. An owner can then tweak their prices from their owner login.

You have more control over the arrival and departure days during different periods/segments of the year. For example, we can offer greater flexibility during January (low season) when it's tough to find new reservations, due to low demand. During August (high season), we can offer 7 nights only from Sat-Sat. This is likely to sell (high demand) and makes the changeover easy to arrange. 

If an owner can offer a shorter break (eg, less than 7-night stay), we create a 'short break rule'. For example, it will only allow for a changeover on Friday and Monday. We can set any combination of allowed changeover days using a customised short break rule. 

Once a short break rule is created, the guest's price is calculated as a percentage of the weekly rate. For example, 2 nights = 60% of the weekly rate. This gives the guest an incentive to stay longer, as the price is lower the more nights they stay. You will likely receive a longer stay, in general, using this pricing model.

Our admin team can make quick changes to rates for you, as we have tools to make changes in bulk if you want our help setting your prices.

The owner can also quickly change the weekly rates from their owner login.

Conclusion:

If a new property gets in touch with us without advertising elsewhere, we will always encourage 'weekly prices'. We think it is better. 

Suppose you are already or plan to advertise on Airbnb or Booking.com; this means you will be using night rates as it's all they allow. In that case, using different price models on different websites doesn't work well as the night rates will conflict with the weekly rates, so we encourage you to match the nighty price model to match on all platforms.