Does the term "last minute" make you think of rushed decisions and emergency offers just to sell the last remaining rooms?

For many hoteliers and property managers, it does. But last minute can be much more: a tool to optimize occupancy and average revenue, especially during periods when demand is uncertain or fluctuating.

It's not just about lowering prices when you're struggling to sell, but about deciding in advance what to do every time you're close to a date and specific scenarios occur: the weekend doesn't fill up as expected, you receive a cancellation the day before arrival, and so on.

Turning last minute into a strategy will help you not only avoid unnecessary discounts and fill rooms faster, but also have more time to focus on guests and service quality.

In this article, we’ll show you which data to monitor to build your strategy and which tools can help you manage last-minute sales quickly and stress-free.

The 3 KPIs to monitor and how to use them for a last-minute strategy in hotels

When it comes to a last-minute strategy, there are three key performance indicators (KPIs) that not only need to be monitored individually but also analyzed in relation to each other: booking window, occupancy rate, and pickup.

Understanding the interactions between these indicators is the key to understanding demand and optimizing your strategy.

1. Booking window and pickup: predicting demand

The booking window is the time between the date a reservation is made and the arrival date. But this metric alone is not enough. You must relate it to pickup, which is the total number of rooms booked within a specific booking window for a given stay date.

Practical example

• It's May 13, and for the upcoming weekend of May 17-18, your occupancy is at 50%.
• Your booking window is very short (4-5 days).
• The pickup in the last 48 hours was just 2 rooms.

What does this mean?

50% occupancy for the next weekend might seem like a good start, but with such a short booking window and a low pickup, you are in a critical situation.

In this case, you need to react quickly:

• You could apply a small last-minute discount of 10-15% to increase visibility on OTAs.
• Check if the pickup increases in the next 24 hours.
• If the pickup doesn't grow, consider further increasing the discount to fill rooms.

Besides allowing you to apply discounts more strategically, monitoring booking window and pickup helps you plan your rates to approach your dates with a better position.

Another example

• It's May 13, and for September 13, you already have 50% occupancy.
• Your average booking window for September is 60 days, but there are still four months to go.
• In the past week, the pickup was 6 rooms.

What does this mean?
50% occupancy for a September date, achieved so far in advance, is a positive sign. This is not the time to lower prices – in fact, you may need to raise them.

Having half of your rooms already booked this early could indicate high demand, and that your current prices are too low compared to the true potential of your property.

2. Occupancy rate and pickup: understanding when to take action

The occupancy rate represents the percentage of rooms sold out of the total available for a specific date. But simply knowing how many rooms are already booked isn't enough. You always need to check whether your occupancy rate is increasing or slowing down.

Practical example

• It's May 13, and for the weekend of May 30, your occupancy is at 50%.
• However, in the last five days, you haven't received any new bookings. This indicates a stalled pickup.

What does this mean?

A stalled pickup is a warning sign. If demand is stagnant and occupancy isn’t growing, you risk reaching May 30 with empty rooms. But if you act quickly – for example, by applying a 15% discount (a drop, which means a price reduction) – you can stimulate sales and recover.

What tools do you need to implement a last-minute strategy at your property?

Manually building and managing an effective last-minute strategy requires time, attention, and a deep understanding of your market. You need to constantly monitor occupancy rates, set different discounts, update rates on each sales channel, and evaluate the effectiveness of your actions daily.

To do this, you need to:

• Easily access your performance data.
• Quickly update prices and availability across all sales channels.

Additionally, it would be ideal to quickly launch email campaigns to communicate discounts or special offers to your contact database, as we discussed in our article on email marketing strategies for the low season.

Of course, this is a complex process with a high risk of errors. But there is a faster, easier way to take advantage of last-minute sales: setting up a fully automated strategy using a tool like Smartpricing, Smartness’s dynamic pricing and revenue management software.

How to automate your last-minute strategy with Smartpricing

In the Advanced Strategies section, you can set up your last-minute strategy to automatically adapt to your property's actual situation.

To do this, simply use the Custom Rules feature, which lets you create personalized rules to modify how drops and pickup rates behave based on your property's occupancy and the number of days before check-in.

Here are some practical examples.

Days until check-in: 15 to 7 days

• If the system detects occupancy between 51% and 100%, you can set a -10% discount.
• If the occupancy rate is lower (between 0% and 50%), you might increase the discount to -20%.

Days until check-in: 7 to 0 days

In this case, if occupancy is between 0% and 99%, you could set a more substantial discount, such as -30%.

As you can see in the example screenshot below, you can apply different rules for low or high seasons. You can set multiple rules for each season, both based on the distance from check-in and the occupancy rate.

This allows you to avoid having to manually adjust prices every day because the rules are automatically triggered: Smartpricing’s algorithm constantly monitors occupancy and applies discounts at the right time.

Following the example above, we applied discounts for cases where there are still rooms to sell in the last 15 days before check-in.
But what happens to rates for bookings made more than 15 days before check-in?

To check, you can view the "Impact Preview" chart shown in the screenshot below:

In this example, at 60 days before arrival, with an occupancy of 50%, the algorithm automatically increases prices by +8.04%.

This means you don’t have to manually adjust rates for every single booking window, guessing every possible occupancy percentage. Instead, the algorithm will set the best rules to optimize your strategy and occupancy.

In other words, custom rules give you maximum control, allowing you to choose the strategy you want to apply to your property within a specific booking window – but you don’t have to set them manually.

If you prefer to let the algorithm manage prices based on occupancy and distance from the date, another way to intervene is to adjust the default aggressiveness. This means setting how aggressively the algorithm should increase or decrease rates depending on the conditions.

For example: Do you want the rate to be higher at 60 days before check-in with 50% occupancy?
Just move the Drop & Pickup Aggressiveness slider to the right, and the algorithm will automatically react more decisively (in our example, increasing selling rates by +24.12%).

Once you’ve set your rules, you no longer need to constantly monitor booking trends and update prices accordingly. You can focus on everything else, knowing that the algorithm continuously optimizes your rates to help you sell at the most profitable price and minimize the risk of unsold rooms.

Want to do even more to boost occupancy?

By using Smartpricing together with Smartconnect, the software will detect periods of low occupancy and automatically suggest email marketing campaigns to promote personalized offers and discounts to your contact database.

Want to see how it works?