When it comes to commercial strategy, some decisions seem minor—until you look back at your end-of-season results. One of these is how early you open availability for the next year.

Many properties, especially small and midsize ones, tend to wait until late summer to publish rates and calendars for the following year. Often, this is simply due to lack of time, not having clear visibility on future pricing trends, or the assumption that guests “would never book this early anyway.”

In reality, opening your 2026 availability as early as spring 2025 can give you a powerful competitive advantage—if done correctly.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the real benefits of opening your calendar early, the potential risks, and how to do it in a way that’s safe and effective.

The benefits of opening your hotel or vacation rental calendar early

Opening your calendar well in advance offers a range of strategic advantages that can directly impact your bookings, average rate, and online visibility. Let’s break them down:

1. Better ranking on OTAs

One of the most immediate benefits of early opening is increased visibility on booking platforms. OTA algorithms (like those of Booking.com, Airbnb, etc.) tend to reward listings with wide availability by pushing them higher in search results.

This matters most during months when many competitors are still invisible: being visible first helps you capture searches, get clicks, and generate early interest.

Example: A user searches in April 2025 for a stay in August 2026. If your calendar is open, you’ll appear in the results, increasing your chances of being saved to favorites—or booked on the spot. If it’s still closed, you miss out on visibility right when competition is at its lowest and bookings are easier to secure.

2. Early bookings (with low acquisition cost)

Opening early also means enabling early birds to actually book. This applies especially to repeat guests who, in many destinations, tend to ask about the following year’s availability right at the end of their current stay.

Being ready means you can reply with a quote right away and close the booking within minutes—no need for future campaigns or promo codes. That’s a no-effort booking that also strengthens the relationship with your guest.

Example: A happy guest from Easter 2025 asks if they can already book for 2026. If your calendar’s open, you send them a personalized offer that same day. If you’re still behind on next year’s pricing, you risk losing them to a quicker alternative.

3. Build a solid booking base to optimize your ADR

Another major benefit of early bookings is that they allow you to build a solid foundation on which to create a more effective pricing strategy.

If you’ve already secured a portion of your inventory well in advance, you can focus on increasing your ADR (Average Daily Rate) during high-demand periods instead of scrambling to fill rooms at the last minute.

Example: Imagine that by April 2025, you’ve already received 25% of your bookings for July 2026. This gives you the flexibility to gradually raise rates on remaining rooms, protecting your margins and allowing you to respond more clearly to market fluctuations.

When early availability can be risky

As we’ve seen, opening your calendar far in advance can be a smart move—but only if done right.

The real risk isn’t opening availability, but doing it in a static or unplanned way. In these cases, you may trigger issues that impact your profitability and daily operations. Here are the main ones:

1. Opening availability with fixed rates

Early bookers are usually price-conscious: they look for good deals, take advantage of early bird offers, and often expect free cancellation options.

If you open your calendar with fixed and conservative rates too far in advance, you might secure occupancy early—but at lower prices than what you could earn with a dynamic pricing strategy based on your historical data and market trends.

2. Managing everything manually

Keeping your calendar open that far in advance means constantly adjusting prices, restrictions, availability, and policies. And you need to adapt not just to seasonality but also to changing demand, competitor activity, local events, and moveable holidays.

Without the right automation tools, you risk losing control or making errors that hurt your revenue. For many independent properties already doing everything on their own, that workload quickly becomes overwhelming.

3. Underestimating stay restrictions

When you open your calendar early, you shouldn’t just activate availability, you also need to apply the right stay restrictions from the start. One of the most important is minimum stay rules.

If you don’t configure or monitor them properly, you might receive bookings that block strategic dates or create calendar gaps that are hard to fill and directly impact your profitability.

How to safely open availability (up to 500 days in advance) with Smartpricing

If you want the benefits of early availability without the stress of mistakes or constant manual updates, there’s good news: you don’t have to miss out.

Smartpricing, the dynamic pricing and revenue management software by Smartness, lets you set rates up to 500 days ahead and updates them multiple times a day.

This means you don’t need to run complex reports or manually forecast trends: Smartpricing’s algorithm automatically calculates the best price for your rooms or units at any given moment and keeps optimizing based on real-time data.

At any time, you can check the future rates suggested by the algorithm: just open your “Calendar” and set the future date you want to review. Hovering over the question mark icon shows you which factors were taken into account. In the screenshot below, for instance, you can see the rates published for Easter 2026.

And what if a guest calls and asks for a quote for a far-off date, maybe for different room types?

With Smartpricing, you can give them an answer in under a minute—no guesswork, no delays.

Inside the “Calendar” section, just click the calculator icon (top right) to instantly calculate the selling price for the requested date (e.g., next Easter), as shown in the screenshot below.

How to keep full control over your pricing strategy with Smartpricing

Smartpricing’s algorithm works independently, updating your rates based on demand. But that doesn’t mean it makes decisions for you or runs on autopilot.

Every suggested rate is based on the starting prices you’ve set up during your initial Smartpricing configuration. These base prices represent your ideal selling rates—and you’re always in full control of them.

That means you can adjust the starting prices at any time, for any future period, with just a few clicks.

Example: Are you planning to renovate some rooms or apartments in 2026, and want to raise your rates as a result?
Simply go to the “Starting Prices” section under “Property Settings” and increase the base prices for the relevant room types, applying the change only to the periods you choose.

Smartpricing will immediately show you a graph preview of the new suggested prices, up to 500 days ahead, just like in the screenshot below. 

How to manage minimum stay rules long term (and error-free) with Smartpricing

In addition to automatically optimizing your prices up to 500 days in advance, Smartpricing also allows you to manage your minimum stay restrictions in detail. In the “Minimum Stay” section, you can apply any rules you need—based on the time period, room type, or apartment.

You can configure minimum stay rules in a “static” way (just like you would in your channel manager), or use the “Dynamic Rules” feature to apply flexible rules that automatically adjust based on booking windows.

This feature is especially useful when working with long-term availability, as it allows you to create rules that automatically change the minimum stay depending on how far in advance the booking is made.

In the screenshot below, for example, we’ve set a mandatory 2-night minimum stay for Easter 2026, valid for bookings made from today until 10 days before the arrival date.

If you want more examples, check out our article on how to manage minimum stay restrictions.

Beyond setting minimum stay rules, Smartpricing also helps you avoid the risk of orphan nights—those single nights left between two bookings that can no longer be sold because they don’t meet the minimum stay requirement.

The software will automatically detect these orphan nights and reduce the minimum stay for that specific date to 1 night, making it instantly bookable. This helps you maximize occupancy without the need for manual intervention.

And if one of the surrounding bookings gets canceled? No worries: Smartpricing will automatically restore your original minimum stay rules, bringing the configuration back to your intended setup.

Smartpricing isn’t just the best way to open your availability early and without worry. Thanks to its integration with your PMS or channel manager, your prices up to 500 days in advance will be automatically synced across all your sales channels, eliminating hours of manual work and reducing the risk of errors.

At the same time, by leveraging the other tools included in Smartness, you’ll be able to implement an integrated strategy in just a few clicks: from email marketing to guest communication during the stay, from upselling and cross-selling to market analysis.

With Smartness, you can reach every one of your growth goals, effortlessly.

Want to see it in action?