Pricing and Calendar Audit
Find the specific settings costing the host money, quantify each, and hand back a change list with numbers.
This is the exact playbook text every Supahost agent ships with — installed for each member, removable in one click. Platform policies change: verify any deadline or dollar amount against the current Airbnb or Vrbo help center before you rely on it.
Step 1: Get the data
Ask for, or read from what the user provides:
- Calendar export for the next 90–120 days: date, availability, nightly rate, minimum stay, booked or open.
- Trailing performance: last 90 days occupancy, ADR, and total revenue. Prior year same period if available.
- Fee structure: cleaning fee, extra-guest fee, pet fee, and any length-of-stay discounts.
- Rule settings: minimum and maximum stay by season, advance notice, preparation time, booking window, check-in and checkout day restrictions.
- Comps: 5–10 genuinely comparable listings — same bedroom count, same guest capacity, same submarket, similar amenity tier. Reject comps that differ on any of those; a 3BR with a pool is not a comp for a 3BR without one.
If the user has a channel manager or dynamic pricing tool, ask which one and what its base rate and min-rate floors are set to. Many problems are a floor set once and forgotten.
Step 2: Compute the metrics
Do arithmetic in code, not in prose. Write a short script, run it, and report the outputs. Never estimate a revenue figure by eye.
Compute:
| Metric | Formula |
|---|---|
| Occupancy | booked nights / available nights |
| ADR | room revenue / booked nights |
| RevPAR | room revenue / available nights, or occupancy x ADR |
| Total-price index | this listing's total for a representative stay / comp set median |
| Orphan night count | gaps shorter than the applicable minimum stay |
| Blocked-night ratio | host-blocked nights / total nights |
| Booking pace | share of the next 30 / 60 / 90 days already booked |
Compare on total price, not nightly rate. Airbnb documents that it ranks price on the total before taxes including fees and discounts, and displays total price by default worldwide since April 2025. A $180 night with a $250 cleaning fee loses to a $220 night with a $90 fee on a 3-night stay, in both ranking and guest perception. Always run the comparison at a representative stay length.
Step 3: Run the checks
Work every check the data supports. For each finding, state: what is set now, what it should be, and the estimated annual dollar impact with the arithmetic shown.
The five that most often dominate:
- Minimum stay blocking demand. Vrbo documents that minimum-stay, check-in-day, and booking-window rules exclude a property from matching searches entirely — this is invisibility, not a lower rank. Airbnb explicitly advises reducing length-of-stay restrictions to improve visibility.
- Orphan nights. A 2-night gap under a 3-night minimum is unbookable by construction.
- Cleaning fee crushing short stays. The fee is a fixed cost spread over fewer nights, so it hits exactly the bookings a host is trying to win.
- Flat rates across a demand curve. One rate for a weekday in February and a Saturday in July is leaving money on both ends.
- Stale dynamic-pricing floors and base rates that no longer match the market.
Step 4: Deliver
Produce a file with:
- Current-state metrics table.
- Findings, sorted by annual dollar impact descending, each with the arithmetic.
- A rate grid — specific recommended nightly rates by season and day-of-week for the next 120 days, as a table the user can enter or upload.
- A rules change list — min-stay by season, gap rules, advance notice, discounts, fees — stated as before → after.
- What to measure, and when to check it.
For anything over about 30 rows, build it as a spreadsheet rather than an inline table.
Guardrails
- Show the arithmetic on every dollar claim. "This costs about $4,200/year" must be followed by the multiplication that produced it, with the assumptions named. Never assert an impact figure you cannot derive from the user's own data.
- Never promise a revenue outcome. Recommend the change, state the mechanism, and name what to measure. Markets, seasons, and competitors move.
- Do not claim ranking magnitudes. Both platforms publish which signals they use; neither publishes weights. Direction is fair to state, size is not.
- Do not recommend price fixing. Never suggest coordinating rates with other hosts or property managers in a market. Benchmarking against publicly listed rates is normal; agreeing on rates is illegal.
- Flag regulatory limits. Minimum-stay floors are legally mandated in many cities — 30-night minimums, permit-based night caps, primary-residence rules. Before recommending a minimum-stay reduction, ask whether a local ordinance or HOA sets a floor. Do not advise a change that would breach one, and note that this is not legal advice.
- Respect the owner's constraints. Owner-blocked dates, an owner's rate floor, or a "we do not do one-nighters" policy are business decisions. Quantify what they cost and let the owner decide; do not override them.