Every market has a shape. Lake towns peak in July and empty in November; ski towns invert that; city listings ride conference calendars and summer tourism; southern snowbird markets peak in January. A single year-round rate ignores the shape entirely — which means overcharging your empty season and undercharging your busy one, simultaneously.
Find your market's curve
Three ways to see it, from roughest to sharpest:
- Ask the calendar: you already know your market's big months. Write down the obvious peak, the shoulders on either side, and the dead zone. That instinct is 70% of the curve.
- Watch your comps across seasons: the same 5–8 comparable listings you baseline against (see the pricing guide) — check their rates for a July weekend and a November weekday. The spread between those two numbers is your market's seasonal range.
- Check your own history: if you have a year of bookings, your occupancy by month is the curve, measured.
Turn the curve into multipliers
Set your baseline rate for shoulder season, then move the other seasons off it. Typical leisure-market spreads look like:
- High season: baseline × 1.2–1.5
- Shoulder: baseline × 1.0
- Low season: baseline × 0.7–0.85 — with a floor: never below your cost line
Weekends and events stack on top of the seasonal multiplier, not instead of it. A high-season event Saturday is the most valuable night your calendar will see all year — it should be priced like it.
Low season is a strategy, not a discount
When demand dries up, price cuts compete with everyone else's price cuts. Often the better levers are: shorter minimum stays (capture the 1-night business traveler your high-season rules exclude), weekly and monthly discounts (one 28-night booking can beat a scattered month), and being the listing that's actually worth booking at a middling price rather than the cheapest one nobody chose.
Review on a rhythm
Seasons drift — a new festival, a new hotel, a border-rate summer. Twice a month, glance 6–8 weeks ahead and adjust the next season's multiplier before it arrives. The free pricing score reads your next 30 days on demand, and the $9 Snapshot Report prices each night individually — a fast way to sanity-check that your curve matches what your market is actually doing right now.