Pricing a hotel isn’t just picking a number for a room. It’s a set of choices: what your base rate is, how it moves, what rules you attach to it, and how other rates connect to it. This post covers three ideas that sit at the centre of most hotel pricing strategies: BAR, open pricing and length-of-stay controls. BAR means best available rate, and it’s the price everything else hangs off. Open pricing is a more flexible way of setting prices by date, and length-of-stay rules decide who can book which nights. You don’t need all of them on day one, and small hotels often use only a few. But understanding how they fit together helps you build a pricing setup that’s easy to run and hard to break. It also makes conversations with software vendors a lot less confusing.
BAR: the rate everything hangs from
Best available rate is the lowest public price you offer for a room on a given date, with no special conditions beyond the basics. Other rates, like a non-refundable plan, a breakfast package or a corporate deal, are usually set as a discount or an add-on to BAR. That’s handy. Change BAR and the connected rates move with it, so you don’t update twenty prices by hand. It also gives you something to compare against. If BAR is $120 and your non-refundable rate is $108, everyone on the team knows what the offer is. The usual mistake is having too many unconnected rates, which makes pricing slow and leads to errors. A clean setup usually has one BAR per room type, a handful of derived plans, and clear rules for who can see them.
Open pricing: a different way to set it
Open pricing, sometimes called flexible or unrestricted pricing, means setting a price for each night and letting it move with demand, instead of fixing rates into rigid tiers with set price levels. The exact meaning varies between vendors, so ask what a system means by it. In practice it fits well with dynamic pricing, because the price can go to whatever level the market supports on a given night, not just to the next step in a fixed ladder. It also gives you finer control on busy and quiet dates. The catch is that it needs good data and sensible limits. Without a floor and a ceiling, open pricing can swing too wildly, and guests who watch your site might see big differences from one day to the next.
Length of stay: protecting the dates that matter
Length-of-stay rules decide how long guests must or can stay. A minimum stay of two nights on a busy weekend stops a one-night booking from breaking up a longer stay you could have sold. A maximum stay or a closed-to-arrival rule on a certain date can do similar jobs. Some hotels price differently by length of stay, offering a lower nightly rate for longer visits, which can help fill quiet weekdays. The trick is to use these rules sparingly. Too many restrictions confuse guests and send them to competitors, especially on OTAs where people compare quickly. Make sure restrictions reach every channel through your hotel channel manager and your booking engine, or you’ll find a one-night booking you didn’t want sitting on a Saturday.
Rate plans, parity and direct bookings
Beyond BAR, most hotels run a few plans: flexible, non-refundable, with breakfast, corporate, long stay. Each should have a purpose and an audience. If you can’t explain in a sentence why a plan exists, remove it. Then think about parity. Guests compare prices across OTAs and your own site, and many OTA contracts require you not to undercut them publicly. That makes your direct channel tricky, since you want guests to book direct but can’t always show a lower public price. Many hotels add value instead: free breakfast, flexible cancellation or a late checkout for direct bookings. A good pricing strategy also considers commission. A booking at $120 through an OTA with 18% commission nets less than a direct booking at $115.
Putting it together
Start simple. Pick one BAR per room type, build three or four plans from it, add minimum stay only on dates that need it, and set a floor and ceiling for every price. Review weekly, adjust monthly, and keep notes on why you changed things. When the routine gets heavy, bring in software. Aiosell offers a revenue management system and dynamic pricing in the same platform as its property management system, channel manager and booking engine, with a 15-day free trial, so you can see how it handles BAR, restrictions and channels on your own rooms. Whatever you use, test one change at a time. If you change five things at once and revenue moves, you won’t know why. A pricing strategy is mostly a habit of small, tracked decisions, and it gets better each month you keep doing it.
