Shoulder season often leads short-term rental managers to make an almost instinctive move: to cut prices as bookings slow down after the summer. However, this may be exactly the wrong place to start.
This is one of the key takeaways from the masterclass “Shoulder Season Is Coming: Getting Your Teams Aligned Before It Costs You More,” hosted on August 20 by RSU by PriceLabs and RevLabs by PriceLabs, featuring Jay Whiteley, VP Revenue and Commercial at VueStay Vacations by Casago, and Uvika Wahi, editor and short-term rental market analyst at Rental Scale-Up.
Whiteley’s main argument is that price is not the starting point, but the outcome of a series of factors. A property’s visibility across distribution channels, listing quality, photos, reviews, fees and minimum-stay restrictions all affect demand before price even enters the equation.
Therefore, when bookings slow down, the first question should not be “how much should I lower the price?” but rather, “why isn’t the property booking?”
Shoulder season: Who is now travelling outside peak season?
There is a second reason why blanket discounts can cost revenue: the audience travelling in September and October has changed.
Traditionally, the periods between high and low season were seen as a prime opportunity for travellers looking for lower prices. That remains true, but they now represent only part of the demand.
Couples with two incomes and no children are travelling more outside the traditional summer season, as they are not tied to the school calendar. Remote workers can turn a four-day break from Thursday to Monday into a short getaway, while another group of travellers deliberately chooses autumn to avoid the crowds of peak season.
In a poll among masterclass participants, 40% estimated that deal-seeking travellers still make up the main audience during shoulder season. However, another 23% identified couples without children, while 11% pointed to families taking advantage of autumn school breaks.
This shift has a direct impact on pricing. If a property manager treats as a “deal seeker” a guest who deliberately chose to travel in October and was willing to pay a rate close to summer levels, the lost revenue cannot be recovered.
Read also: Shoulder seasons on Airbnb: How to increase bookings
1. Before changing prices, take a “X-ray” of the previous season
The first step Whiteley recommends is a retrospective analysis of the previous period. This should not be limited to occupancy and average daily rate.
Managers should examine guest reviews, support requests, the condition and photos of listings, fees, minimum-stay restrictions and the property’s presence across different sales channels.
A drop in a property’s rating, for example, from 4.8 to 4.6, may indicate a cleaning or maintenance issue. In such a case, lowering the price does not solve the cause of weaker demand – it simply makes a cheaper product out of one that still has the same problem.
This analysis is now becoming easier even for smaller managers. PriceLabs points out that data from PMSs and pricing tools can be analysed with the help of AI without requiring a dedicated data team. Through the company’s MCP connector, users can, for example, ask questions in natural language through Claude, ChatGPT or n8n.
Another interesting observation from Whiteley concerns the timing of new strategy tests. Rather than experimenting during the low season, when there is less data and the picture may be misleading, he recommends testing new strategies during peak season, which can generate 70%-80% of a portfolio’s annual revenue.
2. The critical metric is not just occupancy, but how many nights can actually be sold
The second step focuses on a metric that is often overlooked: the nights that are actually available.
The revenue equation is essentially simple: how many nights are available for sale, what percentage of them is sold and at what average rate. The latter two variables – occupancy and ADR – usually receive most of the attention. The first, however, can change without being immediately noticed.
An owner may block three weeks for personal use. A property may accidentally remain unavailable for sale after a technical issue. A new listing may be added to the portfolio with limited availability without this being properly reflected in forecasts.
All of these factors reduce the actual “inventory” a manager has available to sell. And unlike a price that can be changed tomorrow, a night that was never available for booking is lost permanently.
The same approach also changes how the loss of a property from a portfolio should be assessed. The departure of a unit with a large portion of its calendar permanently blocked may have a much smaller financial impact than the number of properties alone would suggest.
3. During weaker months, owners need more – not less – communication
Shoulder season does not only test revenue. It also tests the relationship between the property manager and the owner.
When bookings decline and the owner has no clear picture of what is happening in the market, it is easy for them to assume that their property is underperforming or that another manager could deliver better results.
That is why, according to Whiteley, weaker months may be the best time for a property manager to demonstrate the value of their work.
There is an important difference here between a simple monthly report and genuine owner communication. The latter should answer four questions: how did the property perform compared with the market, how did it perform compared with the same month last year, what actions did the management team take, and what is the plan for the next quarter?
In other words, it is not enough to have strong performance. The owner also needs to understand why it happened.
PriceLabs also presented its Owner Analytics tool at the masterclass, through which such updates can be generated and sent on a scheduled basis.
4. Pricing, marketing and operations need to solve the same problem
The final step concerns how the different teams within a management company work together.
A weak month may be interpreted by revenue management as a pricing problem, by marketing as a visibility problem and by operations as an operational issue. If each department moves independently, the business risks implementing different –and potentially conflicting– solutions at the same time.
Uvika Wahi’s proposal is to organise a short internal “hackathon,” bringing together people from different functions to solve one specific problem.
Instead of a broad objective such as “improve the guest experience,” the problem should be measurable: for example, “the review score has dropped by 0.2 points since June” or “the number of nights blocked by owners has increased by X%.”
The process should be short –24 to 48 hours– and the outcome should not be another presentation, but something that can be implemented immediately: a new checklist, a message template for guests or owners, or a change to an operational process.
The goal is for pricing, marketing and operations to stop treating the same problem as three separate issues.
The order makes the difference
The four steps are interconnected. Analysing the previous season shows what actually affected performance. Reviewing available nights reveals how much “inventory” is genuinely available for sale. Systematic communication with owners helps keep properties –and their calendars– in the portfolio. And collaboration between different teams allows the company to implement a common solution.
The most important message, however, concerns pricing itself. The 2026 shoulder season is not necessarily a cheaper version of summer, nor is everyone travelling outside peak season looking for a discount.
For a property manager, therefore, automatically cutting prices as soon as the booking pace slows can prove to be a double mistake: it may fail to address the real problem holding bookings back while, at the same time, leaving money on the table from guests who were willing to pay more from the outset.
