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NEW! Improve Your Capacity Utilization and Boost Profits with Flexible Pricing

Tips & Advice

author

Frank Scheibe
March 5, 2018

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bookingkit’s new flexible pricing feature makes it easy to fill your tours and activities to capacity while minimizing the amount of work required on your part. Each tour, activity and event can now be assigned individualized automatic pricing adjustments at any time — right down to the hour.

This means a given diving course can be automatically offered at a different price on Monday morning than on Sunday afternoon, or your Segway tours can be booked at a slightly higher price point during high-demand events, such as local city festivals. Now you can be in full control of your pricing without having to create individual events for each price point.

Why offering flexible pricing?

The flexible pricing feature makes it possible to fill your tours and activities to capacity without bending over backwards. Plus, you can optimize your profits by making low-demand periods cheaper and high-demand periods more expensive. This has the added benefit of automatically giving your customers a wider selection of tour and activity options to choose from. Offering special introductory pricing could be just the thing to get more potential and return customers to attend your climbing classes — even the one on Thursday morning.
All the above-mentioned benefits have the effect of boosting overall sales, since each activity is offered at the most effective price point at precisely the right time. It’s never been this easy to experiment with different pricing strategies to find the perfect balance for your business!

Key benefits of the new flexible pricing feature:

  • Get full control over pricing with customizable prices for each tour and activity
  • Improve capacity utilization with targeted pricing
  • Get more bookings in low-demand periods and avoid unnecessary costs
  • Boost profits with optimized pricing
  • Book last-minute activities faster
  • Offer customers a wider selection of tour and activity options without any extra effort
  • Attract more potential customers and improve customer relations

By the season or by the hour: the right price at the right time

Each area of the tours and activities industry requires a different strategy when it comes to pricing. Some operators modify their prices on a seasonal basis, while others change their pricing every week. Still others base their pricing around special events, holidays, sales or particular customer groups. No matter which strategy you use, you now have much more control over your pricing thanks to the new flexible pricing feature from bookingkit. If you’ve never experimented with different prices before, or you’re looking for new ideas to get the most out of your pricing structure, keep reading!

The top 10 ways to use automatic price adjustments

1. Seasonal rates: keep business buzzing in the off-season
We’re all familiar with the idea of prices being more affordable during the low season and more expensive during the high season. Now, with bookingkit’s flexible pricing, you can add seasonal prices for diving courses, stand-up paddleboarding and all other seasonal indoor and outdoor activities in a single go without having to lift a finger for the rest of the year.
2. Monthly rates: indoor activities, outdoor adventures and Christmas parties
If you already know that July and August are slow months for your trampoline park, why not lower prices and at least cover your running costs? Or boost prices on your escape rooms in December to collect that company party profit. Simply set the desired price point once and never worry about it again.
3. Weekly rates: vacations, holidays and rainy days
If spring break or an extended weekend is coming up in your part of the world, it’s time to raise prices on your indoor park or pottery class. Or if the forecast is calling for two weeks of bad weather, simply lower prices on balloon rides, paragliding and sailing activities.
4. Daily rates: special day and weekend rates
Special day rates are all the rage now for cooking courses, city tours and dark dining — why not pick a day of the week to offer special rates on your tours and activities too? And you can’t go wrong with good ol’ special weekend rates. Play around to see which days of the week work best for you.
5. Hourly rates: 24 happy hours a day
For operators who offer activities that run on an hourly basis, such as soccer, tennis, squash, trampoline parks and escape rooms, optimizing pricing by the hour is a great way to boost overall revenue. Create your own happy hour and offer your tours and activities at half price during select hours of the day!
6. Grand openings: introductory rates and fine-tuning
Grand openings are a good time to offer special introductory rates to draw in potential customers and formally introduce your business to your future customer base. Even if you only choose one new tour or activity out of a range of others — perhaps your first Moroccan cooking class within a much larger offering of Mediterranean cooking events — it could very well be a good idea to offer discounted rates during the first four weeks so that you can book the event to capacity, get feedback from customers and fine-tune any aspects that may need improving.
7. Sales: vacations, holidays and special occasions
The year is packed with occasions to offer special rates, whether weekly, daily or by the hour. Take your pick: Valentine’s Day, Easter, summer vacations, the Olympics, Halloween — the list goes on. Picking the right price point is a great way to get the most out of these occasions. And the best part is: most of them happen every year.
8. Local events: trade shows, festivals, city-wide events
If your city gets flooded with trade show and festival goers at the same time each year, do what hotels do and adjust your pricing — whether you choose to raise or lower prices — to take full advantage of the influx of potential customers.
9. Special promotions: children’s birthdays and bachelor parties
If your Saturday tours and activities are overbooked with birthday parties or bachelor parties (not to mention all your Saturday regulars), you can easily optimize your capacities by making birthday parties more expensive on Saturdays and more affordable on Sundays. And for bachelor parties, you can do just the opposite.
10. Different customer groups: individual customers, groups and companies
bookingkit’s flexible pricing makes it possible to optimize bookings between individual customers, groups and companies. This lets you concentrate on different groups, and their needs, at different times so that you don’t have to rally all your resources for each group every day of the week. You could make Thursdays ideal for companies, Fridays for groups and all other days for individual customers. How? By adjusting your pricing!
And last but not least: You can also manually adjust your pricing at any time — even at the last second — to help fill your tours and activities to capacity.

How can I see which days aren’t filled to capacity?


In your bookingkit backend, you can find all the information you need to know which days are being utilized well and which ones are not. The traffic-light-colored capacity indicators next to each scheduled activity are based on a one-of-a-kind algorithm which analyzes historical data from you, and operators like you, to forecast future tour and activity performance. To see how your activities are performing, activate the Yield Management module and take a peek in your calendar. All scheduled activities with red indicators are a good place to start experimenting with flexible pricing. To learn more, check out our help article on this topic.

Flexible pricing looks better with the new bookingkit

bookingkit-Widget-Checkout-Banner
The perfect combination of good looks and enhanced functionality: The new flexible pricing feature, paired with the new Widget 2.0 and Checkout 2.0 features, makes for a particularly attractive addition to your booking setup. For full details, have a look at our blog entry on this topic. Simply send us an email to upgrade to bookingkit 2.0.

SEND AN EMAIL TO GET CHECKOUT 2.0 AND WIDGET 2.0


To learn more about the many benefits of using a booking system to book tours, activities and events online, head over to the bookingkit info pages. We’re here to help if you have any questions.

author

Frank Scheibe

Frank is a tours and activities industry expert. He reports on the latest facts, figures and trends in the bookingkit blog and the bookingkit newsletter. In his free time, he enjoys spending time with his kids and family, playing sports and eating good food.

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