How seasonal pricing works

Set higher festive rates or slow-season discounts and know exactly what each guest is charged. The rules, in plain English, with worked examples.

Vilo prices every booking the same way, in five fixed stages. Once you know the order, you can predict every cent — and the preview you see, the price the guest sees at checkout, and the amount we charge are always identical.

The Vilo pricing stack

Nightly rate — for each night we pick exactly one rate, in this order: a seasonal rule → your weekend rate → your base rate.
Occupancy — your per-guest / extra-guest settings adjust that nightly rate.
Stay discounts — whole-place combo, then length-of-stay (weekly 7+ nights, monthly 28+ nights). A percentage off the nights subtotal only.
Fees & extras — cleaning fee (once) and add-ons. These are never discounted.
Total — Vilo never adds a commission or success fee.

Weekend nights are Friday and Saturday — the high-demand leisure nights.

What a seasonal rule is

A rule has a When (a date range — a one-day range is a single-date override like New Year's Eve), a What, a Where (the whole place or one room), a Priority, and an optional minimum-nights for those dates.

The What can be one of two types:

Set price — the exact nightly price for those dates. Your extra-guest fee still applies on top. Best for a whole listing or a single room. (On a per-person room, a set price is a flat room nightly and won't scale by guest count — use a percentage there.)
Percentage — a +/- change like +40% for the festive season or -20% for slow winter. It scales your base, per-guest and extra-guest rates together, so it stays correct across multi-room and per-person listings. A percentage replaces the weekend rate on the nights it covers.

The three golden rules for overlaps

More specific wins — a room rule beats a whole-place rule, for that room.
Higher priority wins — stack a short holiday (priority 10) over a long season (priority 1).
Newest wins ties.

Seasonal rules never stack — exactly one wins per night, and it replaces the weekend rate on the nights it covers.

Worked examples

Festive +50%, a three-room guesthouse: an R1 200 room becomes R1 800/night and an R2 000 room becomes R3 000/night on the covered dates. Cleaning and discounts are unchanged.
Single-night New Year's Eve: a one-day "set price" of R3 000 at priority 10 sits on top of a longer R1 500 December season at priority 1 — only 31 December is R3 000; the nights around it stay R1 500.
Winter -20%: an R1 000 room becomes R800/night across the slow season, and per-guest pricing still scales.
Weekend vs season: a Thursday-to-Sunday stay with an R1 000 base and R1 500 weekend rate and no season is R1 000 (Thu) + R1 500 (Fri) + R1 500 (Sat). If a festive season covers those nights, the season replaces the weekend rate.

Common mistakes

Using a "set price" rule on a per-person room and expecting it to scale with guests — use a percentage instead.
Forgetting that cleaning fees and add-ons are never discounted.
Two overlapping rules with the same priority — give the one you want to win a higher priority number.