Rates that move on their own,
in an order you can read.
Up for the weekend. Down as an unsold night gets close. Held high over the dates you know are worth holding. Five layers decide what a night costs, the highest one wins, and the order never changes — so you can always answer the question “why is this night that price?”
Five layers. The highest one wins.
Most pricing tools give you a pile of switches and leave you to guess which one won. This is the whole decision, in order. Read it from the top: the first layer that has something to say about a night is the price of that night.
A price you typed on that night
Per-night overrideYou clicked one date on the calendar and typed a number. Nothing outranks that, because you meant it. It is the only layer that survives every other rule you have running.
A rule set covering that night
Fixed price, or ± a percentageA named block of dates — Christmas, a festival, the whole of January — carrying either a flat nightly price or a percentage. A percentage is usually what you want: it lifts the whole stack underneath, so weekends stay proportionally higher instead of being flattened to one number.
The last-minute ladder
Steps down as the date approachesA set of rungs measured in days out. The night quietly reprices itself as it gets closer and stays unsold. This is the layer that runs on its own with nobody watching it.
Your weekend price
Friday and Saturday nightsApplied when it is set and different from your base. Two nights a week that most calendars leave sitting at the weekday rate.
Your base price
The floorWhat a night costs when nothing above it has an opinion. Everything else in this list is a reason to depart from it.
The order matters more than it looks. Rule sets sit above the last-minute ladder on purpose — otherwise a “7 days out” rung would quietly undercut the price you set for Christmas, which is the opposite of what anybody means by peak season.
A night that is not selling should not wait for you to notice.
The last-minute ladder is a set of rungs measured in days before check-in. As a date gets closer and stays open, it steps down. You set the rungs once and they apply to every night, forever, without anyone opening the calendar.
| Days before check-in | This night | What is happening |
|---|---|---|
| 30+ days out | Base rate | No rung applies yet. The night sits at whatever layers 4 and 5 say. |
| 14 days out | −5% | The first nudge. Still early enough that most of your bookings arrive here. |
| 7 days out | −10% | A week left. The night is now competing with everything else still open. |
| 3 days out | −15% | The last honest chance to sell it at a price you are happy with. |
| Tonight | −15% | Today counts as a rung. The most last-minute night there is gets the deepest step, not the base rate. |
Weekdays and weekends step separately
A Saturday and a Tuesday do not need the same discount, because they were never worth the same. The ladder keeps two sets of rungs so a weekend can hold its price longer while a midweek night starts moving earlier.
Tonight is a rung, not an exception
Today counts as zero days out and gets the deepest step you have set. It sounds obvious, and it is the thing most systems get wrong: the single most last-minute night there is quietly falls back to the base rate.
The percentages above are an illustration, not a recommendation. You enter real prices, not discounts, so every rung is a number you can read and agree to before it ever goes out.
Name a rule once. Drop it on any dates you like.
A rule set is a saved block — “Christmas”, “Festival weekend”, “Winter” — carrying a price and a stay length. Select the nights on the calendar and apply it. Every listing you own can share the same rule, and it is colour-coded so you can see at a glance which parts of the year are already handled.
A flat price, or a percentage
A rule set carries one or the other, never both. A flat price is blunt and useful when you know exactly what a date is worth. A percentage lifts whatever the night would otherwise have cost, so your weekends stay proportionally higher rather than being flattened to a single number across the whole period.
Stay length rides along
The same rule can set a minimum and a maximum stay for those nights. A four-night minimum over a long weekend, applied and removed with the price, so you never leave a tightened minimum sitting on a quiet March once the busy period has passed.
Percentages compound predictably
A listing-wide adjustment and a percentage rule set stack in a fixed order — the listing moves first, then the rule set moves that. Rounding happens once per step, the same way everywhere, so the number on your calendar is the number on Airbnb rather than one that is a dollar out.
Seasons are still your call
Nothing here guesses when your season starts. You pick the dates. What the rule set removes is the tedium of pricing eighty nights one at a time, and the risk of missing forty of them.
What you charge, and what you will accept.
A rate on its own does not protect a calendar. Minimum and maximum stay have their own precedence, so the length rules can move with a season without disturbing the number you charge the rest of the year.
Minimum stay, on its own stack
Minimum nights has its own precedence, separate from price: a number typed on the night beats a rule set, which beats the listing default. So you can tighten to four nights across a long weekend without touching your standing minimum, and it relaxes by itself when the rule set ends.
- Typed on the night
- Rule set covering it
- The listing default
Maximum stay, when you need it
The same idea in the other direction, and the layer most hosts forget exists. A rule set can cap length over a peak period so one long cheap booking cannot swallow your best fortnight of the year.
- Rule set cap
- The listing maximum
- Zero or blank means no cap
One percentage across a whole listing
A single signed percentage moves the listing without you rewriting a rate. It lifts the last-minute ladder, the weekend price and the base — and deliberately does not touch a number you typed on a night, or a rule set price, because silently multiplying those would make the calendar disagree with what was typed into it.
- Applies to layers 3, 4 and 5
- Never to a typed night
- Compounds with a percentage rule set
Charge what each platform is actually worth to you.
Commissions differ, guests differ, and the same night is not worth the same on every site. Each connected channel can carry its own pricing on top of everything above, at three levels of precision — and the more specific one always wins.
A percentage per platform
Airbnb at your rate, Booking.com a few points higher to absorb a larger commission, Vrbo somewhere between. Set once, applies to every night on that channel.
A rule for one weekday
Sundays priced differently on one platform than another, every week, without touching the other six days. Outranks the standing percentage on that weekday.
One night, one platform
A rate or a minimum stay for a single date on a single channel. Outranks both of the above, for that night only.
Minimum stay works the same way per channel, which matters more than the price for anyone running a listing that does well with long stays on one platform and weekends on another.
Bring PriceLabs. We get out of its way.
HostPort applies rules; it does not model demand. If you want a rate that reacts to what your market is doing, connect PriceLabs and it takes the wheel — properly, not as a suggestion HostPort then argues with.
It genuinely owns the price
With PriceLabs on, HostPort stops deciding the rate for that listing and pushes what PriceLabs sets. Our own rule sets are switched off in the interface rather than left available to save a price that would never ship. Half-handing-over is how hosts end up with a calendar that disagrees with the OTA.
Hand over as much as you want
Prices and minimum stays are separate switches. Plenty of hosts let PriceLabs move the rate while keeping their own minimum-stay rules, because stay length is a property decision as much as a market one.
We keep a record of what we pushed
HostPort stores every rate it sent, so a value read back can be attributed — this one is still ours, that one PriceLabs changed. Without that, nobody can tell you why a night is priced the way it is, which is the question this whole page exists to answer.
Turning it off does not strand you
Because HostPort never overwrote its own rules, switching PriceLabs off hands the calendar back to the five layers you already had, rather than leaving every date frozen at whatever was last set.
The price on your calendar is the price you get paid.
A pricing rule is only worth anything if every part of the system agrees what it means. Five places need the same answer: your calendar, your direct booking page, the availability a guest searches, the card that actually gets charged, and the rate pushed to the OTA.
In HostPort those five read the same rules from one place, and an automated test fails the build if the copies ever drift apart. It is an unglamorous thing to build and it is the reason the calendar can be trusted: a disagreement here does not throw an error or light up a dashboard. It just shows you one price and sells the night at another, and you find out at checkout.
Three things this does not do.
Every tool in this category is sold on what it can do. These are the limits, stated plainly, because finding them yourself in month two is worse than reading them now.
It does not read the market
HostPort does not look at what the place down the road is charging, or at how full your city is next weekend. Every number above comes from a rule you wrote. If you want demand-based pricing, connect PriceLabs and it takes over the rate.
It does not hunt for gaps
Nothing spots the two-night hole between two longer stays and discounts it for you. You can price a gap the moment you see it — select the nights, drop a rule set on them — but the spotting is yours.
Length-of-stay discounts are not applied
There is no weekly or monthly discount in the quote. A seven-night stay is seven nights at whatever those nights cost. Airbnb’s own length-of-stay discounts still work on Airbnb; they are simply not something HostPort calculates.
Ten dollars a listing. No extra module.
Pricing is part of Pro, not a module with its own fee. Rates push to every connected channel, so Booking.com and Vrbo move with Airbnb.
The free plan is one-way iCal sync, which carries availability but not rates. Pricing rules need the two-way connection, so they arrive with Pro.
Before you change a single rate.
Does HostPort set my prices for me?
No, and that is deliberate. It applies rules you wrote. The last-minute ladder and the weekend price run on their own once set, but every number in them came from you. If you want a system that decides the number itself by reading demand, connect PriceLabs.
What happens when two rules disagree about a night?
The higher layer wins, and the order never changes: a price you typed on the night, then a rule set, then the last-minute ladder, then your weekend price, then your base. That order is fixed in one file that every part of the product reads, so the answer is the same on the calendar, on your booking page and on Airbnb.
Do the prices reach every channel?
Yes, on Pro. A rate change pushes to every connected channel through two-way sync, so Booking.com and Vrbo move with Airbnb instead of being repriced by hand in three extranets.
Can I charge more on one platform than another?
Yes. Each connected channel can carry its own standing percentage, its own rule for a given weekday, and typed rates for individual nights. It is how hosts absorb a higher commission on one platform without raising the price everywhere.
Will a discount ever take a night below what I am willing to accept?
Only if you wrote a rung that low. The ladder holds absolute prices you enter, not a percentage of something else, so the floor is a number you can read. Rule sets sit above the ladder for the same reason: a peak-season price cannot be undercut by a last-minute rung.
Does it work with PriceLabs?
Yes. Switch it on and PriceLabs owns the rate — HostPort stops applying its own price to those nights rather than fighting it, and pushes what PriceLabs sets. You can hand over prices, minimum stays, or both. Everything else, including messaging and the unified inbox, carries on as normal.
Is dynamic pricing an add-on?
No. It is part of Pro at $10 USD per listing per month, with no separate module fee.
What does the free plan get?
The free plan is one-way iCal sync, which carries availability but not rates. Pricing rules need the two-way connection, so they are a Pro feature.