How to set guesthouse prices in Türkiye: seasons, nights and guests with a handful of rooms

Guesthouse pricing is a small set of dated price periods plus rules for weekends, occupancy and breakfast, written on one page. With a handful of rooms you do not need software: you need three or four seasons, a weekend step, a per-room or per-person basis, a minimum stay, and one rule for phone quotes.

It is the second week of April. The season is a few weeks away, the listing still shows last year's price, and the first WhatsApp message asks for two nights in August for four people. With eight rooms there is no revenue manager to ask, and the family member holding the phone is the pricing department. After reading this you will have a one-page price sheet, a cost floor, dated seasons and a written rule for the price you say out loud.

What does one sold room actually cost you?#

The cost of a sold room is the money that leaves the house because that room was occupied, plus a share of the costs you pay whether it is occupied or not, plus the value of your own hours. That number is a floor, not a price.

Start by separating two kinds of cost. Costs that move with each stay: laundry per bed and per person, breakfast food per person per day, cleaning supplies per departure, water and heating for an occupied room, card or platform fees on the payment. Costs that arrive once a year: insurance, licenses, maintenance, the accountant. The first group scales with guests; the second does not.

Divide the yearly costs by the room-nights you realistically expect to sell, not by the room-nights that exist on the calendar. A small property that assumes full occupancy sets its floor too low, because the yearly costs get spread over nights that never sell. Use last year's actual nights, adjusted for what you believe.

Put your own work on the sheet even though nobody invoices you. Cleaning, breakfast, laundry and answering messages are hours, and a price that ignores them is a price that pays you nothing. Value them at a rate you choose, write that rate down, and count the hours honestly.

Treat the result as the line below which a booking costs you money, and keep it separate from the price you charge. The gap between the two is what funds the winter. Do not add a margin as a percentage of the floor and stop there: the market and the season decide the price, the floor only tells you when to say no.

Recheck the floor when a real cost moves: energy, laundry prices, the price of eggs and coffee. A floor set in March and never revisited is a floor from a different year. For a fuller treatment of each line, see cost per occupied room, line by line.

How many seasons should a small guesthouse have?#

Three or four dated periods are enough for a property with a handful of rooms, and more periods usually cost more in maintenance than they earn. The money is lost in the days between the periods, not inside them.

Build the periods from your own booking record and from the local calendar, not from the four seasons of the year. School holidays, festivals, religious and national holidays, wedding season, the weeks your town fills for its own reasons: these define your demand, not the solstice. If the last two weeks of June behave like July, they belong to the July period.

Write each period with a start date and an end date, not with a month name. A rate that says 15 June to 10 September can be checked by a guest; a rate that says summer cannot. Keep the boundaries on fixed dates rather than on the arrival date of each booking. A rate that depends on when the guest arrives is hard to explain on the phone and hard to keep consistent across channels.

Name the periods in plain words, high, shoulder, low, closed, and use the same names on the listing, in the sheet and in the conversation, so nobody has to translate between them. Decide what happens in the closed period: closed to new bookings, open at a winter rate, or open only for long stays. Leaving it undefined is how a January enquiry gets an August price.

Review the periods once a year, on a date you write down, using the previous year's nights sold per period. Add a period only when a real block of dates behaves differently from its neighbours. If you want to go deeper on the wider method, see revenue management by hotel type.

Per room or per person, and is breakfast inside the price?#

Price per room when the room is what you are selling and most guests arrive as couples; price per person when the number of people in the room varies or when breakfast and board carry real cost. Choose one basis per room type and keep it everywhere.

Under a per-room price, a couple and a family of four in the same room pay the same. That is simple to quote, but it gives away the extra breakfast, laundry and wear that the family causes. Under a per-person price, the room alone is not priced at all, so a single traveler can end up paying a share that does not cover the room. A single supplement or a per-room minimum fixes this.

The most common error is mixing the two inside one quote. A per-room rate with a per-person breakfast added, then a child reduction taken off the total, produces a number nobody can reproduce the next day, including you. Pick a basis per room type and stay inside it.

Breakfast has a cost per person per day and a price per person per day. Decide whether it is inside the rate or added, and state it in the same words on the listing, on the sheet and in the message. Half board and packed breakfasts change the arithmetic, so give them their own line rather than folding them into the room rate.

A price shown to a guest must be the price the guest pays, taxes included. How taxes and any discount rules apply to your own channels and contracts is a question for your accountant, not for the price sheet. Children need one written rule: age limit, free in the parents' bed or not, breakfast included or not, applied the same way by everyone in the family.

Weekends, minimum stay and the single night: what protects the best nights?#

A weekend step and a minimum stay protect the nights that sell themselves. Both must be visible before the guest asks, or they read as a trick at the moment of booking.

Define the weekend from your own arrival pattern. For many leisure properties it is the Friday and Saturday nights, but a town with Sunday visitors has a different weekend, and the definition must match the nights that actually fill. Look at last year's arrivals by night of the week before you decide.

A weekend step can be a fixed amount or a percentage of the season rate. A fixed amount is easier to explain and easier to check on the sheet, which matters when three family members quote prices in the same week.

A minimum stay of two or three nights on the nights that matter, high season Saturdays, holidays, local festivals, stops a single Saturday from splitting a week that could have been sold as a block. The trade-off is real: a minimum stay turns away the one-night guest who might have filled a gap on a Tuesday. Apply it to the dates that need it, not to the whole year.

The single night is not banned, it is priced. A supplement, or a single-night rate inside the season, keeps the room sellable without teaching guests that one night costs the same as two. For the mechanics of these rules, see minimum stay, closed-to-arrival and closed-to-departure rules.

Write the restrictions where the guest sees them before booking: the listing, the website, the message you send with the quote. A restriction discovered at check-in is a complaint, not a policy.

How do you quote a price on the phone or WhatsApp without undercutting your listing?#

One rule: the quote is the listing price for those dates, on the same basis and with the same inclusions, and any difference is decided by a written rule rather than by the caller. The quote goes out in writing.

The failure mode is the verbal discount used to close a booking. The guest learns that the published price is an opening offer, tells friends, and the property ends up with two prices and no way to explain either. If you decide to discount, make it a rule that applies to everyone in the same window: early booking before a date, a longer stay, a returning guest. Not a decision made per caller.

Ask for the dates and the number of guests before saying any number. A price without dates is a promise you may have to break. Then send the quote in writing with the dates, the number of nights, the number of guests, the basis, whether breakfast is included, the total, and what is not included. Keep the same words as the listing: if the listing says the rate includes breakfast, the message says the rate includes breakfast, in the same sentence order.

Record the quote where the next person can find it, so the family member who answers the phone in the evening gives the same number as the one who answered in the morning. For the wider enquiry-to-booking flow, see turning phone, email and WhatsApp enquiries into reservations.

How do you read your neighbors' prices without copying them?#

Read a neighbor's price as a signal about demand and positioning for specific dates, never as the price you should charge. A comparison is only meaningful when dates, room type, basis and inclusions match.

Compare like with like. A per-person rate with breakfast against a per-room rate without breakfast is not a comparison, it is two different products. Look at availability as well as price: a neighbor showing nothing free on a date tells you something about demand on that date, which is often more useful than the number they show on the others.

Your floor comes from your own costs and your own hours. Copying a neighbor's price copies their cost structure, their debt and their staffing, which are not yours. A neighbor who is consistently cheaper may be buying occupancy they need for a reason you cannot see. A neighbor who is consistently higher may be selling something you have not priced: location, parking, a garden, a kitchen.

Check a few times a year on dates you have already chosen, not every morning. Daily watching produces reactions, not decisions. Write down what you saw and what you decided, so next year you can tell whether the decision was right rather than whether it felt right.

What goes on the one-page price sheet?#

One page holds the periods with their dates, the weekend step, the basis and breakfast decision, the minimum stay, the single-night rule and the quote rule. If it does not fit on one page, it will not be used.

Put the periods as rows and the room types as columns, with the dated start and end of each period in the row header. Add the weekend step and the minimum stay as short notes under the table, not as extra tables. The person answering the phone reads notes, not structures.

Write the basis and the breakfast decision once at the top, so nobody has to guess whether the number in the cell includes breakfast. Add the quote rule and the discount rule in two sentences, with the date they were agreed. Print it, pin it where the phone is answered, and put the same file where the listing is updated, so the two cannot drift apart.

Write the next review date on the sheet itself. A sheet without a review date becomes the permanent truth by accident. For the full hotel version with supplements and reductions, see a hotel rate sheet with seasonal prices in one table.

Below the table: the basis per room type, breakfast in or out, the weekend step, the minimum stay, the single-night rule, the quote rule, the discount rule, the name of the person who approved it, and the next review date.

What to do next#

Fill in the one-page sheet this week, in order: the cost floor from your own numbers, then the dated periods, then the basis and the breakfast decision, then the weekend step, the minimum stay and the quote rule. Each part answers a question the others cannot. The floor tells you when to say no. The dates tell you what to charge. The rules tell everyone in the family to say the same thing. The sheet keeps the listing and the WhatsApp message from drifting apart. Review it once a year, on the date written on the page.