If you’re charging the same rate for your peak Saturday morning departure as your half-empty Tuesday afternoon one, you’re leaving money behind — on both ends.

Dynamic pricing fixes that. Rather than setting a flat rate at the start of the season and leaving it alone, dynamic pricing adjusts what you charge based on conditional signals: the time of year, the day of the week, how far out a guest is booking, which channel they’re coming through, and how many seats are left on a given departure.

Airlines and hotels have operated this way for decades — and travellers already expect prices to shift based on timing and demand.

What’s changed is that pricing rules are now built into tour operator booking software, which means a two-person team can capture the same revenue lift without hiring a revenue manager or managing a spreadsheet.

This guide covers the pricing levers tour operators can pull and how to use each one, playbooks by business type, a step-by-step process for building your first rules, and how to set it all up in Bókun — plus a list of other platforms that include dynamic pricing.

The dynamic pricing levers & how to use each one well

You can adjust rates in a variety of ways with dynamic pricing. Here are the five most common ones for tour operators, along with what each one suits and where to be careful.

Seasonal & event-based pricing

The simplest place to start. Charge more during peak season, holiday weekends, and around local events — and drop rates in shoulder months to fill seats when demand isn’t as high.

This pricing trend is already really common among flights, hotels, and rental cars, which makes this the lever with the lowest risk of backlash.

The thing to watch is making big jumps overnight when seasons shift. A bridge rate in the week or two before peak kicks in lets guests see pricing has moved gradually — it’s not some sudden spike.

Day-of-week pricing

Saturdays support a higher rate than Sundays. Midweek departures often need a lower one. Most operators price all days identically — undercharging on their busiest days and overcharging on their slowest ones.

This lever works best when you have at least a full season of booking data, showing demand by day, so you can adjust rates strategically instead of relying on assumptions.

Booking window — early bird & last-minute

These are two related levers that work in opposite directions:

  • Early bird: Offer lower rates for guests who book well in advance — 30, 60, or 90 days out. It locks in bookings early, gives you real forecasting data, and guests feel like they earned the deal.
  • Last-minute: Charge higher rates inside the final 48 hours for travellers who need to book now.

Before you set up this last-minute rule, check what your booking data actually shows. If most reservations usually come in a few days before departure, that’s just when your customers happen to book — and raising prices in that window doesn’t attract a new type of buyer; it just charges your regular customers more at the time they’d book anyway.

This lever only makes sense when late bookings are an actual second wave on top of a tour that’s already well-sold — that’s when there’s real urgency to price into.

Also be aware: large last-minute jumps tend to show up in reviews. A $65 to $73 move is defensible. A $65 to $95 overnight jump is the kind of thing that gets screenshotted for a (bad) review.

Most booking systems let you stack multiple notice ranges within one rule — 60+ days: -15%, 30 to 59 days: -10%, <7 days: +10% — so you don’t need separate rules for each window.

Channel & reseller pricing

This lets you charge different rates for your website, OTAs, and contracted resellers — and you can set this up so you make roughly the same amount per booking, regardless of where it came from.

Here, we suggest:

  • A slightly lower rate on your direct booking site — which incentivises direct bookings so you aren’t paying commissions to anyone.
  • An OTA rate that accounts for the platform’s commission. When a guest books through Viator or GetYourGuide, they take a commission off the booking — typically around 20%. To account for that, you set your OTA/Marketplace rate higher than your direct website rate so that, after their cut, what lands in your pocket matches what you’d make on a direct booking.
  • A negotiated rate for contracted resellers. Resellers work the same way as OTAs — they take a commission on bookings they send you, so you agree on a rate upfront that accounts for their cut. The difference is that OTAs set the commission structure, while with a contracted reseller you negotiate it directly.

One thing to check before you do this: some OTAs require your rate on their platform to match your rate everywhere else. If that applies to the OTAs you’re on, channel-specific pricing isn’t an option there — you’d only be able to use this lever for your website vs. contracted resellers.

Capacity-triggered pricing

Rates step up automatically as a departure fills — say, +10% at 50% booked and another +10% at 75%.

This has the largest potential upside on peak dates — and the highest likelihood of guest backlash if you don’t set limits.

Without a ceiling price, an automated rule can keep pushing pricing into ridiculous levels. And a guest who sees a rate that feels outrageous isn’t just unlikely to book; they’re likely to call you out on it. Set a hard ceiling before you turn this one on, and keep the steps small enough that no single jump looks like a surprise.

The lever also requires real-time inventory updates across every connected channel. If your booking system doesn’t send updated, accurate capacity across all your sales channels, you can trigger a price rise on a departure that isn’t actually filling — or miss the trigger on one that is.

Playbooks by business type

The dynamic pricing strategies you should use depend on your business type. Here are some starting points for each one.

Solo or two-person tour guide

Start with three rules: a high-season and low-season rate, a 60-day early-bird discount, and a lower rate for your quietest time slot. Set them once, revisit each season.

Skip capacity triggers entirely until you have enough volume to see reliable patterns.

Multi-product growing operator

Once you have a season of data, add day-of-week rules per product. And time-of-day rules if you’re running multiple departures each day and they’re filling at different rates.

When your most popular departures are selling ahead of schedule, that’s a signal to manually nudge the rate up — a tour that’s already 70% booked two weeks out has room to earn more from the seats still left.

You can also offer combo experiences and add-ons to raise average booking values.

Repeat-customer business (locals, classes, rentals)

Keep the base rate steady and cap any peak adjustments tightly — a $5 to $10 ceiling above your standard rate keeps things defensible.

Reward repeat customers with early booking access or a standing discount you offer directly — the kind of thing you communicate to regulars personally rather than posting publicly.

And avoid predictable discount patterns; occasional, irregular offers are harder for guests to game than a weekly Tuesday special they can plan around.

Destination tour (one-time travellers)

This is where dynamic pricing has the most room to work. One-time visitors comparison-shop across listings and aren’t familiar with everybody’s prices — they’re just looking at what the experience costs today vs. what else is available.

Good levers here: early bird discounts to lock in bookings from travellers who plan ahead and demand-based pricing around seasons, days of the week, or time of day — if you can see clear patterns in your booking data. Last-minute increases can work too, but keep the steps small — a $10 to $15 move is reasonable.

Of course, the main thing here is to compare your rates with competitor pricing to make sure you’re still within a reasonable range.

Multi-location or enterprise operators

The main risk at this scale is inconsistency — different locations running the same tour at different prices, or one site quietly undercutting another because rules weren’t standardised from the start. Set the same floors and ceilings across every location before you build any rules, so that no matter how automated pricing moves, it stays in a range that makes sense across your whole operation.

From there, let each location’s booking data drive its own rules. A city centre location and a rural one might have completely different peak days and shoulder periods — don’t assume the same rules work everywhere just because it’s the same tour. Run the reports by location before you build, and update them separately at each season change.

The do’s &The do’s & don’ts for all business types

Do:

  • Set a floor price before you touch anything else — the price that covers your variable costs (guide, fuel, permits, equipment) and that no automated rule should ever push below.
  • Set a ceiling price based on what your market and comparable listings will accept — automation should never push rates so high you’d be embarrassed to explain them to a guest.
  • Start with one or two levers; seasonal + early bird is the right first combination for most operators.
  • Move prices early and gradually vs. late and sharply.
  • Review results monthly and rewrite rules at each season change.
  • Pull the booking data you have by product, channel, month, and time slot before writing data-driven rules.

Don’t:

  • Build rules without a floor and ceiling; without these guardrails, the system can charge rates that either lose you money or land in a review.
  • Set channel-specific rates without checking your OTA contracts first — some platforms require your rate on their site to match your rate everywhere else, and building rules without knowing that can put you in breach of your agreement.
  • Discount aggressively on a predictable schedule; “20% off every Tuesday” trains guests to wait and tanks full-price bookings.
  • Apply last-minute markups if late bookings are already your norm — you’re raising prices on guests who were going to book anyway.
  • Build data-driven rules around assumptions. Start with simple seasonal or early-bird pricing, then use booking data to refine day-of-week, time-slot, and capacity-based decisions.

How to build your pricing rules

Now, with everything we’ve covered above, here’s the build sequence.

  • Step #1. Pull your booking data. Bookings by product, channel, month, and time slot. In Bókun, the reporting dashboard breaks this down by sales channel, product, and season. Look at it before you touch a single price.
  • Step #2. Write each trigger explicitly. What’s the condition, what’s the percentage change, and which products does it apply to? “Raise prices in summer” isn’t a rule. “Increase rates by 15% from June 1 to August 31 on the city walking tour” is.
  • Step #3. Start with just a couple of levers. Don’t automate everything at once. Reference the playbooks above for this step.
  • Step #4. Keep moves small. Work in 10% to 15% increments. We’ve already warned about the risks of steep hikes.
  • Step #5. Sort your channel rates. Different OTAs charge different commissions, so your rates will vary across those channels to account for that.
  • Step #6. Push live to all channels at once. Rate changes should sync across your website, OTA channels, partner sites, and anywhere else you sell at once. Booking software like Bókun helps with this. But more on that below.
  • Step #7. Review monthly, reset seasonally. See how these rules impact your revenue and bookings. If revenue increases, without harming conversion rates or booking volume, you know the dynamic pricing rules are working. If revenue or bookings dip, or just remain steady, you need to make a fix. At each season change, rebuild from your current data rather than leaving last season’s rules running.

How to set up dynamic pricing in Bókun

Bókun offers dynamic and variable pricing to leverage all the strategies above. Here’s how to set everything up.

Reporting dashboards — check these before writing rules

Before you build a single rule, pull these four reports in Bókun. They tell you where your pricing rules will actually do something.

  • Bookings by product — find which tours fill consistently and which don’t. The ones that fill reliably are where capacity-based and seasonal rules will earn the most. Underperformers might need a lower early-bird rate to drive bookings, or a lower time-slot rate if a specific departure is always the last to fill.
  • Bookings by sales channel — understand where your revenue is coming from before you start building channel-specific catalogues. If 80% of your bookings are already direct, a channel rate strategy looks different than if you’re split evenly across three OTAs.
  • Bookings by season or month — this is where your price schedules come from. Don’t guess at your peak and shoulder months. Let the data tell you, then build your schedules around what’s actually happening.
  • Bookings by time slot — if you’re running multiple departures per day, this shows you which slots fill first and which sit empty. That’s your day-of-week and time-of-day pricing map — charge more for the 11 am slot that’s always gone by Tuesday, less for the 8 am one that barely fills.

Price catalogues (to offer different rates across your website, OTAs, & partner sites)

When you create your Bókun account, you start with one default price catalogue. That’s the rate your direct booking site uses. If you want to offer different rates across channels — higher rates on OTAs to absorb their commission, separate rates for contracted resellers — you create additional catalogues.

Go to Experiences > Price catalogues and click Actions > Add catalogue. Give it a descriptive title — “Viator,” “Agents,” “Resellers,” whatever makes sense — and save.

Then go into each product you want to apply it to: Experiences overview > click the product > Advanced > Advanced pricing in the product editor. Add the new catalogue there and click Save & Continue, then set the actual prices for that catalogue under Pricing.

Each catalogue can have its own prices and its own price schedules, so your OTA rates can run seasonal pricing independently of your direct rates. When you update a price in a catalogue, it automatically pushes to every channel connected to that catalogue.

Price schedules (seasonal & day-of-week rates)

Price schedules let you set different base rates for different time periods — summer vs. winter, weekdays vs. weekends, or any combination.

To create one, go to Experiences > Price schedules in the left-hand navigation and click Add.

Give the schedule a title, a start date, and an end date. Then use the month and weekday toggles to narrow it down further — you can select specific months and specific days of the week within the same schedule, so “Saturdays and Sundays in July” is one rule, not two. The preview panel on the right shows you every date that falls within the rule over the next two years, so you can verify it before saving.

If you’re running multiple schedules — say a winter rate and a Christmas rate that overlaps with it — the schedule at the top of your list takes priority. Put Christmas above Winter, and the right rate applies automatically from December 20 through December 26 without any manual override.

Once you’ve created your schedules, you apply them to individual products.

Go to Experiences > Experiences overview, click the product you want to update, and navigate to Pricing in the product editor.

From there, choose the price catalogue and price schedule from the dropdown, enter the prices for that combination, and click Save prices. Once saved, the updated rates push automatically to your booking engine widgets and your Marketplace partner contracts.

Booking-notice price modulators (early bird & last-minute)

This is how you set rates that change based on how far out a guest is booking.

Go to Settings > Product Extensions > Price Modulators and click Add. Select Booking notice price modulator from the list. Then, you’ll set:

  • Notice ranges: The booking window and the percentage adjustment. Enter a minus (-) prefix for discounts — e.g. -15 for a 15% early bird discount. You can add as many ranges as you need within one modulator, so a single rule can cover your 60-day discount, your 30-day discount, and your last-minute increase at the same time.
  • Promote as an applied discount: Check this box if you want the discount or price increase to display to guests. If you’re running an early bird rate, checking this makes it visible to guests at checkout — which is worth doing since it frames the lower price as something they earned.
  • Time interval: Choose when the modulator is active. You can set a specific date range, select certain days of the week within a time frame, or limit it to specific months — useful if you only want early bird pricing to run during your peak booking season.

Then select which price catalogue and which experiences the modulator applies to. Once set up, go to Pricing > Price catalogue in the left-hand navigation and re-publish your catalogue for the changes to go live.

Date-based price modulators (holidays, events, & shoulder seasons)

Rather than working off when someone books, these modulators adjust rates based on the actual departure date — useful for holiday surcharges or low-season discounts.

Same starting point here as above: Settings > Product Extensions > Price Modulators > Add. This time, select the Discount or price increase option. Then set:

  • Discount: The percentage or fixed amount to increase or decrease. Again, use a minus (-) prefix for a reduction.
  • Time interval: The departure date range the modulator applies to — e.g. December 23 to January 2 for a holiday surcharge, or January through March for a shoulder season discount.
  • Promote as an applied discount: Same as above — check this if you want guests to see the price adjustment.

Select the price catalogue and experiences, save, then re-publish your price catalogue.

Pricing categories

This is where you set different rates for different types of guests — adults, children, seniors, groups, or any custom category you need.

Go to Settings > Product Extensions > Pricing categories — or just type “Pricing categories” into the search bar. By default, your account comes with Adults, Children, and Teenagers. To add a new one, click the blue Add button and give it a title — “Group,” “Family of four,” “Private tour,” whatever fits your setup.

Dependency rules are what make this useful beyond basic age tiers. To enforce “one adult per child,” go into the child pricing category, set Max depends on another category field to 1, then enable the dependency. You can also set a Max sum for dependent categories — for example, a maximum of three children and teenagers combined per adult booking, regardless of how they’re split.

Once you create your categories, add them to each product individually in the product editor under Pricing, and set the price per category per schedule.

Promo codes

Go to Experiences > Promo codes and click Add.

Set a percentage or flat discount, restrict it to a date window if needed, and choose whether it applies to a specific experience or works sitewide.

You can also choose whether the discount extends to extras and transfers attached to the booking.

Promo codes stack with other discounts — if a guest has a promo code and a price modulator applies, Bókun applies the higher discount.

Bókun overview

Bókun is an all-in-one tour operator software — part of the Tripadvisor and Viator family — that does far more than manage your pricing.

Our toolkit supports all areas of your operations, from booking, resource, and capacity management to customer communications and day-of check-ins.

And we offer some of the strongest growth drivers to get your experiences in front of global audiences: 70+ OTA connections — we’re the #1 restech partner across major platforms, and we hold advanced partnerships with many of the biggest names, like Viator, GetYourGuide, and Google Things to do. An in-built reseller network with thousands of travel industry partners. And Referral Tracking for you to build a totally custom affiliate network.

Check out the full toolkit below:

  • One-click website builder with user-friendly website templates
  • Online booking engine widgets — Book Now buttons, calendar views, product listings, and product overviews — for existing websites
  • Central booking calendar where you can see every reservation from every channel in one view, updated in real time
  • Real-time availability management across all connected channels
  • Product management to create listings for everything you offer — complete with descriptions, photos, add-ons, booking forms, combo experiences
  • Resource managementto track and allocate all of your equipment, vehicles, and guides automatically
  • Pricing tools — everything we discussed above
  • Channel manager with 70+ OTA connections including Viator (Preferred Partner), GetYourGuide (Premium Connectivity Partner), Google Things to Do (approved connectivity partner), Klook, Trip.com, Airbnb Experiences, Expedia, Civitatis, Tiqets, Headout, Musement, Hotelbeds, and more
  • Bókun Marketplace, our in-built network with thousands of travel industry businesses, where you can build reseller partnerships with other tour operators, rental companies, attractions, travel agents, DMCs, accommodation providers like hotels and resorts, transportation services, and more
  • Referral tracking to build your own affiliate network outside of Marketplace
  • CRM to capture customer contact details, booking history, and spend per customer
  • Automated communications with a customisable email template gallery to power all your standard emails (booking confirmations, reminders, follow-ups, abandoned cart emails) and other marketing initiatives (newsletters, promotional emails, announcements)
  • Guest self-service portals where they can view reservations, reschedule or cancel them, and purchase add-ons, without emailing or calling your team for help
  • Mobile apps (iOS and Android) with ticket scanning for check-in
  • Point of Sale (POS)
  • Reporting tools to view bookings and revenue by product, channel, partner, affiliate, and season
  • App Store for add-ons like digital waivers, SMS messaging, and tip management

We offer all of this at some of the lowest rates around: $49/month with 1.5% online booking fees and 0% Bókun booking fees on Viator reservations. (And we give you the flexibility to absorb or pass booking fees to customers — many operators absorb fees during shoulder seasons to incentivise travellers to book, then pass them to travellers during busy months when they’re more likely to book anyway.)

Explore all Bókun’s features and see why we’re one of the highest-rated systems — 4.7 stars — by starting a 14-day free trial (no credit card required).

Other tour operator software with dynamic pricing

Dynamic pricing is becoming a popular feature across tour operator software — any high-quality system should offer it. Here’s a list of the other top-rated names that have now added it to their toolkit.

  • FareHarbor is a Booking.com brand and one of the most widely used tour operator software platforms. Their dynamic pricing tools let operators set rules based on capacity fill rate and time to departure. The only catch with them is the expensive pricing model: booking fees run as high as 6% to 8%, the website-building service is an extra $5k/year, SEO services are $2.2k or $5k annually, and FareHarbor takes a 20% commission on partner bookings through its network (FHDN).

Read FareHarbor reviews on Capterra or learn more in our alternatives guide.

  • Peek Pro is a booking platform with one of the more sophisticated dynamic pricing engines in the category — AI-driven, with adjustments based on demand signals, weather data, and historical booking patterns, rather than just a date or a booking window. They also include abandoned cart recovery, upsell bundles, waitlists, and a unique Peek Capital feature for business financing. Like FareHarbor, Peek Pro charges high fees (6% to 8%), and full pricing details aren’t published online — you have to request a demo to learn more.

Find Peek Pro reviews on Capterra or read our alternatives guide.

Find Xola reviews on Capterra or read our alternatives guide.

Find TripWorks reviews on Capterra or read our alternatives guide.

  • Checkfront has been a staple in tour operator software since 2010 and explicitly lists dynamic pricing rules for individuals, groups, and seasons as a core feature. It’s one of the more flexible platforms for operators running mixed inventory — tours and rentals together. Pricing is somewhat steep here: $99/month with 3% online booking fees.

Read Checkfront reviews on Capterra or read our alternatives guide.

  • Beyonk and BookingHound are sister platforms owned by Beyonk Group — the largest independent experience booking platform in the UK, now serving operators worldwide. Both list dynamic and variable pricing as a core feature. Beyonk suits standard tour and activity operators; BookingHound targets higher-volume attractions managing memberships and season passes. Moderate pricing here: 4% booking fees for Beyonk, $38/month plus 4% for BookingHound.

Read Beyonk reviews and BookingHound reviews or
learn more in our alternatives guide.

  • Ventrata is an enterprise-only booking and ticketing platform (minimum $1M annual revenue) used by Big Bus Tours, the Empire State Building, and Discover Banff. Their dynamic pricing — called Fares in the dashboard — lets you set rates based on time before departure and remaining vacancies, and those prices update automatically across every connected channel at once: online, box office, partner portals, and OTAs including GetYourGuide, Viator, and Expedia. Seasonal, weekday, and departure-time pricing are also available as separate tools. Built for high-volume operations with self-service kiosks, POS terminals, and offline POS capability. Plans start at $575/month with 2% transaction fees.

Read Ventrata reviews on Capterra or learn more in our alternatives guide.

  • Resmark Systems was built by an outdoor adventure company that had run its own tours since the 1960s and couldn’t find software that fit — and that background shows in how it handles the practical demands of activity-based businesses. Dynamic pricing is listed alongside other advanced pricing options. And its built-in WaiverSign tool and automated lead-nurture system stand out. Pricing starts at $15/month + $500 setup with 3.5% fees, or $95/month with 2.5% fees.

Read Resmark Systems reviews on Capterra or
learn more in our alternatives guide.

  • RocketRez is a cloud-based ticketing platform built for attractions. They offer three dynamic pricing modes: native rules-based pricing you control directly; a Spotlio integration that adjusts rates in real time based on demand; and a Digonex integration where economist-curated algorithms analyse 10+ factors (including weather and hotel occupancy) and update pricing daily. Best suited to fixed-venue, high-volume operations rather than typical day-tour providers.

Read RocketRez reviews here.

  • Palisis is a Swiss-based ticketing and reservations platform originally built for large attractions and hop-on-hop-off bus tours, now with options for small and mid-size operators. Their dynamic pricing rules cover booking window, number of bookings made (capacity-based), day of the week, and time of day. They also offer other OTA connections and global distribution tools. Pricing is by custom quote. Better suited for enterprises.

Palisis does not yet have reviews on Capterra or G2.

FAQs on dynamic pricing

How much revenue can dynamic pricing actually add?

It depends on your operation, but the biggest gains consistently come from peak departures — the tours that sell out. If a Saturday morning tour fills up two weeks out at your flat rate every week, that’s a departure where you’ve been leaving money on the table. Dynamic pricing captures it. The lever doesn’t add bookings; it improves what you earn from the bookings you were already going to get.

How often should I update my pricing rules?

Two rhythms: monthly reviews and seasonal rewrites.

Monthly, pull your revenue per departure and compare it against the same period last year. If a rule is working, you’ll see higher revenue on the departures it applies to without a drop in booking volume. If bookings have dropped, the price ceiling might be too high. If booking volume is steady but revenue hasn’t moved, the rule isn’t doing much.

At each season change — before summer, shoulder seasons, or peak holiday periods — rewrite the rules instead of leaving the previous ones running. A rule built for July demand will start quietly working against you in September if you leave it in place. And what filled tours easily in summer might need a lower early-bird threshold in autumn to achieve the same effect.

Check your booking data, reset your floors and ceilings if your costs have changed, and rebuild from there.

Is dynamic pricing the same as surge pricing?

No. Surge pricing implies sharp, short-notice spikes — the kind that end up in reviews as “price gouging.” Well-implemented dynamic pricing moves gradually inside guardrails you set in advance. Guests rarely notice because the change happened over days, not overnight.

Getting started with Bókun

Dynamic pricing is one of the fastest ways to grow revenue from the bookings you’re already getting. And Bókun lets you take advantage of it — with our full toolkit and growth drivers — at some of the lowest rates in the industry. You’re not handing your extra revenue straight back in fees, as you would on platforms charging 6% to 8%.

Set up price schedules, booking-notice modulators, and channel-specific catalogues in an afternoon, and rate changes push to all your connected channels automatically.

Start a 14-day free trial (no credit card required) and see how Bókun can accelerate your growth.