What are Seasonality Templates?

This article primarily applies to property managers with more than 5 properties. For those with less than 5 properties, the advantages of using seasonality templates are muted unless all of your properties have similar pricing.

Benjamin Franklin once said "By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.". There is some applicability in that quote when it comes to the use of seasonality templates. For those that have a strategy or are open to preparing a pricing strategy, seasonality templates will make the setting up of rates and rules very easy. For those folks that price willy nilly across seasons and properties with no real strategy deployed, the seasonality templates might seem inflexible and hard to comprehend.

Even if you don't take advantage of seasonality templates now or ever, rates and rules can still be edited independently within property setup. The seasonality templates are not mandatory and for smaller numbers of properties they may not be needed.

So let's begin preparation:

How do you group your properties?

You might group by location, then # of bedrooms, then type of rental

For example... Oceanfront > 1 Bedroom > Gold Pricing, Silver Pricing, Bronze Pricing

Or there could be any number of ways in which you categorize your properties into pricing groups.

Whatever that strategy is, it needs to be set to use the seasonality templates effectively.

Many property managers have one location and all properties fall into a pricing category based upon number of bedrooms. By keeping the pricing deltas linear across all seasons, updating / adding new seasonality / pricing is super simple. Update the template, the deltas remain the same and all properties assigned to that template are updated. Boom! Done.

A pricing delta is a rate that is different from the template. So if the template calls for $100 per night, that might be fine for your one bedroom properties, but it doesn't work for your two bedroom properties, as they are at $150 per night. So setup all your two bedroom properties with $50 per night deltas, which will price them $50 per night higher than the template across all seasons.

Everything adjusts according to the values in the seasonality template when deltas are used. In theory, you could not use deltas at all. Instead each property could have it's own seasonality template. However that really wouldn't make a bit of sense and would negate any reason for using the seasonality templates.