What a floor price is for

Every pricing tool asks you for a minimum price, and most hosts type the number they would like to earn. That is the wrong number, and it quietly breaks the tool. This is what the floor is actually for, how to choose it, and what it does on the day it matters.

What it is

The floor is the lowest nightly rate that will ever be written to your calendar. In Hostomat it is enforced in our own code: every price is checked against it before it leaves for Airbnb, and a price below it is replaced by the floor. It is not a preference the engine tries to respect. It is a line the write cannot cross.

It is the one number you control outright, and the engine never moves it.

What it is not

It is not your target price. The engine prices to the market. On an ordinary night your price will be well above the floor, and on a peak night far above it. The floor only does anything when a night is still open close to its date and the market around you really has gone that low.

It is also not the same as Airbnb's Smart Pricing minimum. Airbnb says that discounts you add, an early-bird discount for example, can take the guest's price below the Smart Pricing minimum you set. (Airbnb Help, Smart Pricing) A floor that a discount can pass is a suggestion. Ours is checked after everything else.

How to pick the number

Two figures, and the floor is the higher of them.

First, what a night costs you to host: the share of cleaning you do not recover in the cleaning fee, utilities, wear, the platform fee on the night. That is the number below which a booking loses money.

Second, the least you would take to open the door. Some hosts would rather leave a night empty than host it for $60, and that is a legitimate floor even if $60 covers costs. It is your home.

Take the higher of the two. Then resist the urge to add a margin "to be safe". Every dollar you add to the floor is a dollar of the slow week the engine can no longer sell.

Why lower is safer

This is the part that feels backwards. A floor set near your usual rate does not protect you. It stops the engine catching a slow week early, when a small cut would have filled it, and leaves you with a full-price empty week instead. Hosts who set the floor high see the engine "doing nothing" in the off season and conclude it does not work, when what they did was tie its hands.

A floor well under the market is not a promise to sell at that price. On most nights it is never approached. It is the net under the wire, and a net set at wire height is not a net.

What happens in a slow week

Prices ease toward the floor a little each day the nights stay open, and only as far as the market around you has gone. They do not fall to the floor because a week is quiet; they fall toward it as comparable listings nearby drop and stay unsold. If the market never gets there, neither do you. In Hostomat the reasoning is written at the top of the pricing page, so a week that eased says why.

If a night reaches the floor and still does not sell, that is information: at that price, in that week, on that street, nobody was buying. The floor did its job by making sure you did not find that out at a lower number.

Locks, for the nights you know better

A floor is for every night. A lock is for one. Your family is staying the second week of August, a regular guest has a fixed deal, you want a specific price on a specific Saturday: lock those nights at your price, on the site or over WhatsApp, and the engine works around them. Locks are not floors. A lock is a price; a floor is a line.

After the fee change

If you set your floor as the least you would accept in your pocket, it is about to be 15% too low. Airbnb is moving most hosts to a single 15.5% host fee on September 15, and a floor is a nightly rate before that fee. Raise it. The arithmetic is here.

In short

Cost per night or the least you would open the door for, whichever is higher. No margin on top. Lower than feels comfortable. Then let the engine work above it, and lock the nights you know better. That is the whole of it.

How Hostomat prices a night · Your Saturday price is your Tuesday price