Your Saturday price is your Tuesday price. Here is what a night is actually worth.

Open your calendar and look at a Saturday in July and a Tuesday in November. If they cost the same, you are losing money on one of them and losing bookings on the other. That is not a criticism. It is what happens when one number has to stand in for 365 different nights. This is what a night is actually worth, and how a pricing engine, ours or anyone's, reads it. There is no magic in it, and you should not buy anything that says there is.

Four things move a night

• The day of the week. In most markets Friday and Saturday carry a premium and Sunday to Thursday do not. In business cities it flips. The size of the gap is different on every street.
• The season. Not four seasons. A shape that rises and falls across the year, different for a beach town and a ski town and a city with a conference centre, and different again for a two-bedroom and a studio in the same town.
• How far out it is. A night eleven months away is worth a little more than list, because the guest who books that early is not shopping on price. A night three days away is worth less, because the guests who are left are. Every engine eases into the last week. The question is how gently.
• What just booked around you. When your neighbour's Friday sells, the remaining Fridays nearby are scarcer. When yours sells, the nights next to it are worth more, because a guest extending a stay pays for convenience. Pace is the signal most hosts never see, and the one that moves fastest.

Events sit on top of those four. A concert can double a night. A rumour of a concert should not, which is why an engine caps what an event can do to a price rather than trusting a headline.

How an engine puts them together

Start with a base price: what a listing like yours, near yours, earns on an ordinary night. Either you set it, or the engine reads it from the comparable listings around you. Then, for each of the 365 nights, apply the season shape for that date, the day-of-week gap for that weekday, the lead-time curve for how far away it is, and the pace adjustment for what has booked around you since yesterday. Cap the event effect. Then check the result against your floor, and if it is under, write the floor instead.

That is the whole mechanism. Hostomat does it for every night up to a year out, every six hours, and again within minutes when a booking lands. At the top of the pricing page it writes out, in plain English, why tonight costs what it costs. You should never have to take a price on faith.

What the floor is for

The floor is the one number you own outright. It is not a target and it should not be near your usual rate, because then it stops the engine doing the one thing it is for: catching a slow week early and selling it before it becomes a slow month. Set it well under the market, at the line below which you would rather stay empty, and let the price ease toward it only when the market really has gone there. More on that here.

What one number costs you

Say your one rate is $150 and the market around you runs from $95 on a wet Tuesday in November to $260 on a Saturday in July. On the Tuesday you are the expensive listing and you sit empty. On the Saturday you are the cheap one, you book first, and you leave $110 on the table, times every peak Saturday of the year. Both losses are invisible on your calendar, because an empty night and an underpriced night both look like a normal night.

What an engine cannot do

It cannot make a bad listing book. It cannot fix a three-night minimum, a dark first photo, or a title that says nothing. Those come first. It cannot see the future, and it should not claim to; it reads what is booking now and adjusts. And it cannot know that your sister is staying the second week of August, which is why you can lock any night at your own price and the engine works around it.

If you try one

Use one engine per calendar, turn Airbnb's Smart Pricing off first, set an honest floor, and give it three weeks. Judge it on a month of nights, not a day of prices. Hostomat costs $19 per listing per month for up to five listings, the first month is free, and the setup takes about ten minutes.