How a nightly rate is formed, and why one price does not work

A nightly rate is not a property of the apartment. It is the relationship between what you offer and what happens to be free around you at that moment. The same apartment in the same week is worth different amounts depending on how many similar places are open and how many people are looking.

• Season — The coarsest layer. But a season is not one block — the gap between mid-June and mid-August is wider than most owners assume.
• Day of the week — Arrivals cluster around flights and weekends. A rate that ignores this leaves gaps that cannot be filled later.
• How far ahead the booking comes — A booking six months out and a booking for the day after tomorrow are not buying the same thing. One buys certainty, the other solves a problem.
• Length of stay — Seven nights in one booking is worth more than seven nights across three, because there are no three cleans and three arrivals in between.
• The supply around you — Not the town average, but the apartments the same guest would genuinely compare with yours: similar capacity, similar area, similar equipment.
• The listing itself — Poor photographs and an incomplete description lower the rate you can ask for as surely as a poor location does. This is the only layer you can fix without waiting for a season.

A fixed rate feels calm and fair. In practice it does two kinds of damage at once, and neither is visible clearly at the end of the year.

• Too high in the weaker dates — The apartment sits empty, and an empty night cannot be recovered later. Unsold capacity disappears, unlike stock that stays on a shelf.
• Too low in the strong dates — The apartment fills first, months ahead, at a rate that was reasonable back then. When demand rises, you are already full and cannot take part.

A discount only makes sense when you know what it buys. Three types are genuinely used, and each solves a different problem.

• Longer-stay discount — Buys fewer turnovers. Seven nights in one booking means one clean instead of three, one arrival instead of three, and less room for something to go wrong.
• Early-booking discount — Buys certainty. It makes sense while the season is far off and the alternative is an empty calendar, and stops making sense the moment demand picks up.
• Last-minute discount — Buys a night that would otherwise be lost. It should never be set as a standing rule, because guests then learn to wait.

The same rate you set does not look the same on every channel, because commission and fees are calculated differently. So the observation that “Booking is more expensive” usually compares two different things.

For an owner only one number matters: what remains after the channel's commission. That figure appears in the monthly overview, where the gross amount, the commission and the base are kept apart precisely so they do not blur together.

An accurate calendar. A booking that appears on two channels at once costs more than any wrong rate — one guest has to be cancelled, and platforms penalise host cancellations in ranking.

So before any discussion about rates we settle the calendar and availability. A rate can be corrected next week. A cancelled booking cannot.

We follow rates through the season and align them across the agreed channels, within the access we agree. It is work that needs looking at weekly, not once in spring.

The decision stays yours. If you think the rate for a period is wrong, ask for a correction — we will explain what the change means for occupancy, but we will not push it. Your apartment, your call.

What we will not do: promise a percentage increase, build an earnings calculator, or tell you what you will make this season. That would need data we do not have, and a figure that merely sounds precise is worse than none.