Your Saturday 7pm slot sells itself. Your Tuesday 3pm slot often sells to nobody. Both cost you the same rent, staff and electricity. The difference between a good month and a great one often hides in that second slot.
The instinct is either to ignore it or to panic-discount everything. There's a calmer middle path: rules.
Find your heat map first
Before touching prices, look at utilisation by day and hour for the last two months. A common shape: packed weekend evenings, a decent Friday, and a desert between Monday and Thursday before 6pm. That desert is your raw material.
Write rules, not prices
Manual discounting is a part-time job you don't want. Rules do it for you: a price that depends on the weekday, the time of day or a specific date. An example starter set:
- Monday to Friday before 5pm: 20% below standard – for example €28 instead of €35 per person.
- Weekends, public holidays and school holidays: standard price, whatever else is going on.
- A promotion with its own promo code for one specific quiet week, if you want to test demand before changing a rule for good.
Set a floor and a name
Two guardrails keep this healthy. First, a floor price you never cross, so the discount never trains guests to wait. Second, the framing: this is “off-peak pricing”, language guests already know from cinemas and gyms. It reads as fair, not desperate.
Set the rules, then leave them alone for a month. Watch whether the desert fills and whether weekend revenue holds. Adjust one rule at a time, or you'll never know what worked.
The venues that do this well don't have braver pricing. They have pricing that runs itself. In Leisbase, price rules by weekday, time and date are applied automatically at booking, and revenue recommendations point you to the slots worth a closer look – so the Tuesday slot sells while you're busy running Saturday.
