Does changing pricess affect upcoming stays?

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so i haven’t raised my prices in the ten years i’ve been doing this. i use smart pricing with an $87 minimum and the sky’s the limit. i charge $70 per cleaning no matter how long or short the stay. my place tends to book last minute, with some smart people booking months or a year ahead (big events), and i run somewhere near 50% occupancy, maybe a little higher.

okay, i want to nudge the minimum price up 3 or 4 bucks, but will this affect upcoming stays from people who trust the price they booked will stay the same?

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Anything you change on your listing, be it prices, cancellation policies, house rules, maximum guest counts, etc., is only applicable to future bookings. You have to honor the parameters confirmed guests booked under, you can’t ask them for more money and they won’t be charged more by the platform just because you raised your prices. The nightly fee when they booked is locked in.

Of course, if a host offers “add-ons”, like going shopping for the guests and stocking the kitchen for an extra fee and the guest decides after they booked to ask for that service, or lets you know after they booked that they are bringing a pet and you have a pet fee, you can get them to pay for that through the resolution center.

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For me, I’m on the outskirts of the Boston, MA area and while I do get bookings specifically searching for my city, most of my guests will only find my STR if they use the filter for price so I check pricing every 2 weeks or so and using a private window, see what price I need to be to show up in Boston searches. My winter has been terrible so I am bringing my prices pretty low but not too low as to get really bad guests. Once our full season starts in May, I bring my pricing back up, reset 2 day minimum, one day notice, and raise my cleaning fee. This strategy has helped me keep my STR booked this winter with about 70 percent full.

I know you asked about raising, but you could use this strategy to see how sensitive prices are against your competitors.

In my market, there are so many STR units, that I need to do this to compete in my low season.

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