One Sunday in Year 1 of running Onera Fredericksburg, I almost threw my laptop out the window.

I couldn’t bear to:

• Look at another unbooked weekend
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• Play another game of “drop the price” chicken with my competitors
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• Wonder if I should discount now or wait closer to the date

Sound familiar?

As Modern Hospitality operators, we’re constantly walking the tightrope between charging more and being 100% booked.

We’re all looking for that single magic bullet, especially when it comes to making pricing decisions.

But we’re constantly juggling multiple variables that seem at odds with each other:

• ADR
• Occupancy
• Revenue
• Booking pace

The higher you price, the more your guests expect from you.

And the more your experience needs to exceed those expectations (or risk a negative review).

That’s why I give so much attention to RevPAR (revenue per available room).

Since it’s your ADR × your occupancy, it tells you whether a price change actually made you more revenue.

So, here are 2 ways to start increasing your RevPAR:

Way #1: Raise your prices on the nights that consistently sell out.

This is the single most effective habit you can build as an operator.

The mistake so many operators make is once they know what their best dates are, they stop messing with the pricing.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?

Wrong.

Because keeping your pricing as is, is probably the reason you’re:

• Discounting just to fill your calendar
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• Relying on your weekends to raise your ADR
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• Booking at 80-100% occupancy but still missing your revenue projections (which is a RevPAR problem, not an occupancy problem)

So whenever you try incremental price changes and rooms aren’t booking fast enough, you lose your nerve.

The race to the bottom starts again…

And any shot at premium pricing goes down with it.

Instead, follow these 3 steps to get more confident raising rates:

1. Price your hottest dates aggressively, based on your and your competitors’ past pricing
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2. When a date gets booked faster than expected, raise the rates of other comparable dates and unit types (we recommend 10-15% to start)
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3. Keep raising prices each time these comparable days or units get booked

Once guests stop booking, then you know you’re close to the upper limit of your pricing.

But Ben, how often should I be updating my pricing?

Check your prices as often as you can, and at least on a weekly basis.

Why?

Because when multiple sets of dates are filling up fast, you want to catch them in time to raise the rest.

And if you only check once a month, then those nights are already sold at the old price.

Next, let’s talk about…

Way #2: Set a two-night minimum on your biggest holidays.

There’s one block of dates that I’ve seen get sold over and over again:

Christmas and New Year’s.

Guests don’t book those nights alone. They book a few in a row.

If you allow guests to book a single night on these holidays, the nights before or after it become much harder to sell.

So we recommend at least two nights minimum during the week of:

• December 24th for Christmas
• December 31st for New Year’s
• February 14th for Valentine’s Day (especially if you’re running couples’ experiences)

This way you can book these dates in advance, without worrying about empty nights before or after them.

And when you combine both of these together?

We recently helped a 5-key luxury resort operator in a North Carolina mountain town inside our Modern Hospitality Accelerator:

Before joining, he was stuck at:

• 56% occupancy
• $238 ADR

But in just a couple of months, he’s now sitting at:

• 60% occupancy
• $270 ADR

Which is a 22% jump in RevPAR ($133 → $162).

All that changed?

He followed our pricing and revenue management playbooks to strategically raise prices (without sacrificing occupancy).

So, this week, open your calendar:

• Check that the 3 dates above have 2-night minimums
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• Schedule a weekly pricing review in your calendar (lots of us do it on Sundays)
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• Check your pricing calendar for a high-demand date (that you can start raising prices on)

That way, you have a system for setting and raising prices (instead of discounting when you don’t need to be).

Talk soon,

Ben Wolff

Founder, Oasi & Modern Hospitality Accelerator

PS… Wondering if you’re not charging enough?

After helping 50+ properties scale inside our Modern Hospitality Accelerator, I can confidently say that’s probably the case.

The good news is:

Most operators struggle with this (so you’d be in good company).

For example, we started working with a landscape resort operator.

And within his first 3 months, he hit:

• A 20% increase in ADR
• More than 60% occupancy

But the best part is the extreme confidence in his ability to create demand and direct bookings quickly.

Ready to start scaling your property now (and walk into 2027 with the systems already in place)?

​Click here to see if you qualify for our Modern Hospitality Accelerator.​