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Where the price for one night comes from

· 7 min read

The price for a particular night comes from your base rate multiplied by several factors, each of which answers a different question about that specific night. There is no model here that cannot be taken apart, and no number that comes „from the algorithm”. Below is the whole route, in the order we walk it.

The starting point is your price, not somebody else’s

We start from the base rate you give us when you add the property. That is a deliberate choice, and it helps to know the alternative: we could start from the market median, that is, from what other people charge. Then every one of our customers in a given city would get proposals circling the same number, and your air-conditioned apartment with a view would be priced like a windowless room two streets away.

The base rate is your knowledge of your own property — its standard, its regulars, the things no table shows. Our job is to say how far to move AWAY from it on a particular night, not to put something of our own in its place.

Then we ask about that one night

Each factor answers a separate question, and each either speaks up or stays silent. Silence is a legitimate answer here: a factor that cannot be calculated honestly does not guess.

  • Season. Whether this month is strong, weak or average in your region. We calculate it from open European statistics, separately for different types of property, because the shape of the year differs between them enough to move a month into a different season class.
  • Events. Whether something nearby is drawing guests in — a trade fair, a concert, a match, a long weekend. We keep the calendar by hand, city by city, and a person approves every entry.
  • Day of the week. At the start we use the general weekend rhythm. Once your own history builds up, we replace it with the rhythm MEASURED at your property — because at some places Thursdays sell best, not Saturdays.
  • Your calendar. How much you already have booked around that night, and whether a single free night is left between bookings that nobody will buy as part of a stay.
  • Booking pace. Whether this date is selling faster or slower than usual for you — we compare you with yourself, not with the market.
  • Weather. Only once we have measured that it genuinely matters at your property. In the mountains snow can be a reason to come rather than an obstacle — so we do not assume the direction of the effect either.

Factors MULTIPLY, they do not add up

That sounds like an accounting detail, and it is the source of the most common mistake when people do this arithmetic in their heads. A season adding 15% and a weekend adding 10% do not come to 25% together, but to 26.5% — because the second percentage is calculated on an amount the first has already raised (1.15 × 1.10 = 1.265). Adding understates the result, and does so more strongly the stronger the factors are — that is, most of all on the nights that matter most to you.

We round the result to the nearest five złoty. Not because it is easier to calculate that way, but because PLN 413 looks like the output of a machine, and PLN 415 looks like a decision.

Two boundaries stand at the end

The price will not leave the range you set yourself. And it will not go below the break-even rate calculated from your cost per night, the portal commission and the VAT rate — if you have given us those numbers. Of the two lower boundaries, the higher one always wins.

If it was the break-even rate that stopped the price rather than your own range, we say so plainly. The difference matters: you set the range yourself and can lower it, whereas the break-even rate only comes down if your costs do. The full break-even arithmetic is set out on a separate page.

And you always see what happened

Every proposal comes with the three strongest reasons and the size of their effect. Not because it looks good — because without it there is no decision to make. „Raise it to PLN 480” is an instruction. „Raise it to PLN 480, because there is a trade fair in town, it is a Saturday, and you already have four of the five surrounding nights booked” is an argument you can disagree with.

And you do not have to agree. You approve with one click, or you enter your own price. Nothing goes to your booking system — a person enters the price, so no mistake of ours can change what a guest sees.

What is not in this calculation

There are no automatically collected competitor prices — the terms of the large portals forbid that outright, so we gave up a working mechanism rather than count on nobody checking. If you want a market benchmark in the calculation, you enter your neighbours’ prices yourself, for a chosen night.

Nor are there multipliers we cannot justify. Every factor has a threshold derived from data, and one we cannot calibrate simply stays silent — and that is a correct result, not a failure. Our methodology covers this in more depth, including a section on what we have not yet measured.