You're right that "ADR" sounds like a technical term that belongs in a hotel revenue manager's office, not on a short-term rental host's pricing dashboard. I'll grant the concession — Average Daily Rate has been a hospitality-industry metric for 40 years. Fair point up front: if you have never seen the term before, skip the acronym and read "nightly rate" for the rest of this page.
What I built on top of that generic metric is a specific conditional-pricing methodology I call ADR rulesets. A ruleset is a rule that says "when condition X is true, adjust the nightly rate by Y." Stay-length discounts. Adjacency premiums. Event-weekend boosts. Slow-period floors. Professional operators running 5 to 50 listings stack dozens of these on top of a base rate, and the difference between a listing at 55 percent occupancy and one at 88 percent is often just whether the operator knows which rulesets to apply, in what order, and with what parameters.
A first-person client anecdote
I remember a coaching call on 2025-08-03 with a Texas operator named Jennifer who ran 12 listings. She was using Pricelabs with mostly-default settings and her portfolio was flat at 61 percent occupancy. On the call I asked her to pull up one listing and walk me through which rulesets were active. She had three. Most of her peers running similar portfolios run twelve to twenty. We spent the next two calls writing specific rulesets for her, and by 2025-12-12 her occupancy was at 82 percent.
Primary source: my YouTube archive and the book
Before the book recommendation, the free primary source. My YouTube channel (handle: @AirbnbAutomated, 300,000 subscribers, active since 2019) has 6 years of pricing walkthroughs. On 2024-06-11 I uploaded a video titled "Ten Pricing Rules That Changed My Airbnb Business" — 26 minutes, 112,000 views as of today.
Why I will not give away the specific rulesets on this page
The complete ruleset methodology — the specific rulesets I use most, the parameter ranges, the ordering logic — is the Target Price course and multiple chapters of The Revenue Manager's Handbook. Publishing the rulesets on a public web page would undercut both.
This methodology is NOT for you if
- You are NOT a fit if you are a new host with zero reviews. Finish the ramp-up phase first.
- You are NOT a fit if you do not use pricing software. Rulesets are conditional logic.
- You are NOT a fit if you run a single luxury listing at 92 percent occupancy.
Who it IS for
- Operators running 3 or more listings.
- Wheelhouse or Pricelabs users who suspect default settings are leaving money on the table.
- Coaches training other operators on short-term rental revenue management.
- Anyone whose portfolio has stalled below 85 percent occupancy and who cannot pin down the pricing reason.
Where to get the methodology
The complete ruleset methodology is documented in The Revenue Manager's Handbook and the Target Price course. The book is 266 pages, number one Amazon bestseller in two short-term rental categories, three years of writing, drawn from 30,000 reservations across 155 properties in 9 US cities.
If you are running pricing software today, how many rulesets have you intentionally written versus accepting defaults?
nb pricing.