How to price weekends and weekdays differently
Few hotels fill evenly through the week. A hotel for business travellers fills from Monday to Thursday and empties at the weekend; a resort or a hotel near a getaway fills on Friday and Saturday and is quiet midweek. One price for every night leaves money on the busy nights and rooms empty on the quiet ones. Find your own pattern in your bookings, check it against the hotels around you, then give the busy nights and the quiet nights a price and rules of their own.
Also called: dynamic pricing, day-of-week pricing, weekend rates, revenue management.
A OneHorizyn guide. Updated .
Find which nights fill for you
- 1Take the past six months of stays from the system your front desk books rooms in, or from your register.
- 2For each night of the week, count the rooms sold and the average price they sold for.
- 3Leave out festival and holiday nights: they are busy for reasons of their own.
- 4Note the strongest nights and the weakest.
- 5Do it again for each season. A hill station's weekends in May are not its weekends in January.
Check it against the hotels around you
Your own bookings show what happened at your price. The hotels around you show what the town expects. Look at what each nearby hotel charges on Google for a Tuesday and a Saturday in each of the coming weeks: if most charge more on Saturdays, the town fills at weekends, whatever your own bookings said.
Where you and they differ, find out why. A hotel that fills its weekdays with one company's staff may price its weekends low for a reason that isn't yours.
Set a price for each kind of night
- Start from your usual price, and set one price for your busy nights and another for your quiet ones, rather than a new price every day.
- Move in steps you could explain to a guest who books both: a few hundred rupees, not double.
- Set them in the one place that sends your prices to every site at once, so that your website and every booking site change together.
- Check your weekend price against the tax step below.
The nightly price above which GST on a hotel room in India goes from 5% to 18%, as Booking.com tells its Indian partners. A weekend price just over it can add more to the guest's bill in tax than in price.
Rules that fill the quiet nights
- A minimum stay on your busiest night: two nights over Friday and Saturday sells the Friday with the Saturday. Lift it in the last week if the second night hasn't sold.
- A price for longer stays that brings a weekday night in with a weekend.
- Something for the quiet night itself, such as a later checkout on Sunday or breakfast included midweek, rather than a lower price everyone sees.
- For a business hotel, a weekend offer for families and couples from your own town and the cities nearby, sold on your own website and to past guests.
A minimum stay can leave short gaps that nobody can book. Booking.com's extranet has rules that open such nights by themselves, and its Partner Hub explains how to set them.
Treat long weekends as weekends
A public holiday on a Friday or a Monday makes a weekend three nights long, and for a getaway hotel the extra night can sell like a Saturday. Put the year's holidays in your calendar from the Government of India's list and your own state's, and price those nights as your busiest. In 2026, Christmas Day falls on Friday 25 December.
Check what sold, and move the step
Each month, look at each night of the week again: the rooms sold and the price. If weekends sold out early at the higher price, the step can be bigger; if Saturdays were left over, it was too big. Change one thing at a time, so that you can tell what worked.
