You've filled the calendar.
The next gain is in the rate.

Summary

Where this stands

Desa took over a badly run property and turned it around. Occupancy went from unstable to consistently high, the listing now holds 4.86 stars across 14 reviews and Guest Favourite status, and gross ADR climbed from €70 in March to €85 in July. None of what follows is a criticism of the operation.

The issue is on the revenue-management side. At 87% occupancy with a €6/night marginal cost, the villa is leaving money on the table in a way that a demand-following pricing algorithm will never surface on its own — because from the algorithm's point of view, a full calendar is a success.

Annualised on the March–July run rate, and after the monthly common-area invoice, the owner nets roughly €11,240 per year on a €300,000 investment. That is a 3.7% yield. The rest of this document shows where the gap is and what it would take to close it.

RevPAR · the metric that matters

Five months of performance

Occupancy alone doesn't tell you whether a month went well. RevPAR — net revenue divided by every night in the calendar, sold or not — does, because it prices the empty nights in.

Owner figures are the 80% distribution less the €55 monthly common-area invoice. July is shown as reported; the Rp 10.3m bedding replacement is treated separately below.

The night ledger

Every night, March to July

This is the whole period at the resolution the decisions are actually made at — one square per night, coloured by the channel that sold it.

Eleven of the twenty empty nights were one- and two-night gaps

Short gaps are not blocked here. Four two-night stays were sold through Airbnb over these five months, and two of them slotted exactly between existing bookings — Ronny Sutanto on 4–6 March and Yassine Outgharmine on 22–24 June, each with a guest checking out the morning they arrived and another checking in the morning they left. Whatever the nominal minimum stay is, the calendar is letting these through.

So these nights were sellable. They simply didn't sell:

Selling all of them would move occupancy from 87% to 94%, with no extra guest turnover beyond what is already happening on either side of each gap. Two out of nine sold; the question is what to do about the other seven.

€6.01 per night

What a night actually costs

This is the number the whole strategy rests on, and it is much lower than it intuitively feels.

Staff, pool, power, internet and the complex invoice all run whether a guest is in the villa or not. Only laundry, consumables and wear scale with occupancy — about six euros a night.

The practical consequence: occupancy is worth defending, and price increases are cheap to test. Every euro added to the nightly rate flows almost entirely to the bottom line, and it takes a large occupancy loss to cancel out even a modest increase.

On the July bedding line

The Rp 10.3m linen replacement is legitimate wear, but landing it in a single month made July's result look like an operational failure when it wasn't. Throughout this analysis it is spread across twelve months so that the underlying trend stays readable — the €3.54 per night in the table above is that figure, together with average repairs and maintenance.

Channel mix

Marriott guests pay 25% more

Across 131 nights from March to July, Marriott returned €78 net per night against Airbnb's €62. That is not a fee advantage; the take rates are within 0.2 points of each other. Marriott's guests simply pay more — €94 gross versus €75 — and they book longer stays (6 and 7 nights).

One caveat before reading too much into this. Smart Pricing governs Airbnb only; Marriott's rates run on a separate plan and were never discounted the same way. On adjacent dates in May, Marriott sold at €89 gross while Airbnb sold at €72 — which may say more about where the discounting was applied than about the guests. The honest conclusion is that Airbnb looks underpriced relative to what this villa can achieve, and Marriott is the evidence for it. Whether Marriott also deserves a larger share of nights is a question to settle once both channels carry the same rates.

Direct bookings are being discounted away

Four guests booked through Airbnb and then extended directly. Direct nights carry no channel fee, which is worth 17.2% — but the direct rate has been set so far below the Airbnb rate that most of that saving is handed straight back to the guest:

Blended, direct nights returned €67 net against Airbnb's €62 — a 7% gain when the fee saving alone was worth 17%. The rule should be: a direct rebooking is priced at the Airbnb rate less 5%, not less 25%. The guest still saves, and the villa keeps the difference.

Booking.com is the weakest channel on both dimensions — 19.0% take and the lowest gross ADR. It is worth keeping for reach, but it should never receive the best rate.

The core argument

How much occupancy a price rise can afford to lose

Because the marginal cost of a night is €6, a higher rate is protected by a very wide margin of error. This chart shows, for each list price, the occupancy at which the villa would earn exactly what it earns today.

This is why the recommendation is to raise rates decisively rather than in 5% increments. The downside is bounded and the current occupancy provides an unusually large buffer to test into.

Proposal

A seasonal calendar instead of a flat rate

Bali demand is strongly seasonal and the current pricing does not reflect that. July was sold at €85 gross — the same order as March, which is shoulder season. The proposal is four rate bands, set as floors, with the algorithm permitted to move up from them but not down.

Even the conservative case — 71% occupancy across the year, well below anything the villa has achieved since March — nearly doubles the owner's return, from 3.7% to 6.6%. The plan does not depend on the villa staying full. It depends on it not being sold cheaply when it is.

Actions

What we'd like to change

Ordered by date. Each item names the system, the exact setting to change, and how to tell it is done. The two euro figures are additional owner profit per month after the 20% management share, taken from the pricing model rather than added on top of it.

Appendix

How this maps to PriceLabs

These settings were reviewed from the live PriceLabs account in August 2026, so the figures below are against what is actually configured rather than assumed.

1. Base and Minimum Price — the ceiling nobody set

Where: Dynamic Pricing → Calendar → Configure Prices, and Customize → Seasonal Minimum, Base and Max Price Settings

One base, one minimum, applied to every date in the year. Because every other rule in PriceLabs is a percentage of the base, this single number sets the ceiling for the whole strategy:

Seasonal bases, entered as date ranges:

• PriceLabs already applies its own market seasonality on top of the base, so these may overshoot. The right method is to set them, then read the calendar for July and December and pull the base back if the result runs past what the market supports. Better to correct downward from a real number than to keep guessing upward from a flat one.
• The Minimum is currently 86% of the base — a deliberately tight floor, and the right instinct. Keep that ratio as the bases rise.
• Maximum is blank. Worth setting one per season, at roughly 1.6× base, purely as a guardrail against a data glitch pricing a night at ten times the rate.

2. Last-minute discounting — leave it off

Where: Customize → Occupancy Based Adjustments

Currently auto-applied, and currently running premiums rather than discounts: +10% inside 15 days, +3% at 16–30 days, and −1% at 31–60. Occupancy is above market, so PriceLabs is charging more for late bookings, not less.

Desa's position is that last-minute discounting should stay off, because guests who see a price fall after booking will cancel and rebook at the lower rate. That is a real and well-documented behaviour, the reasoning is sound, and we agree — there is nothing here we would change.

The durable defence against cancel-and-rebook is the cancellation policy rather than the pricing rule. Marriott takes 50% at booking and refunds nothing inside 14 days, and it is the channel earning the most per night. Whether Airbnb should tighten in the same direction is in the open questions above.

3. Orphan gaps

Where: Customize → Orphan Days

• Define an orphan gap as 2 nights or fewer between two bookings.
• Min-stay override: set the minimum stay equal to the gap length, so a 1-night gap accepts a 1-night booking. This runs alongside the standard 3-night minimum rather than replacing it.
• Discount: start conservative — 10–15% on a 1-night gap, 5–10% on a 2-night gap. Two of our nine short gaps sold at the ordinary rate, so a deep discount may not be needed.
• Note that the Minimum Price is an absolute floor in PriceLabs. If the orphan discount cannot price below it, the effect will be capped — worth one question to PriceLabs support before relying on it.

4. Far Out Prices — already configured well

Where: Customize → Far Out Prices

Set to Market Driven (Balanced): 0% at 60 days, ramping to +20% by day 136 and holding beyond. This is the rule that captures planners booking six months out, and it is doing its job. No change needed — but note that it multiplies the base, so raising the base is what makes it worth more.

5. What to watch

The account shows occupancy at 100% for the next 7 days, 57% for the next 30 and 38% for the next 60. Against a historical 84–94%, the far figures look thin — but a booking window that fills late will always look like this, and March through July would have shown the same shape at 60 days out. The number worth tracking is the 30-day figure as it converges: if it lands near 85% at the new prices, the strategy is working; if it stalls in the sixties, the base has gone too far and should come back a step.

6. What is not a PriceLabs setting

• Channel markups. PriceLabs pushes one rate to Hostaway; the per-channel difference — roughly 2% more on Booking.com to offset its higher commission — is set in Hostaway.
• Direct rates. The OTA-rate-less-5% rule for returning guests is a Hostaway or direct-booking-site setting.
• Airbnb Smart Pricing. Superseded by the API connection. Nothing to do here.

Open questions

Things we can't see from the reports