Same sunbed, different price: charge by season, day, and time slot

Say you charge €12 per sunbed. The same €12 in January as in August, a slow Tuesday as a packed Saturday, the front-row lounger as the one in the corner with no view. One number for everything. It sounds easy — no math, no arguments — but that's exactly where the money slips away.

Because in the middle of August, with the beach packed, that same sunbed would rent for €18 without anyone blinking: you're giving away six euros a spot, hundreds of times a day. And in May, with the sand half empty, maybe at €8 you'd fill the ones that now go unused. A flat price fails on both sides — you undercharge when demand is high and overcharge when it's low — and on top of that it doesn't tell your best spot from your worst. The alternative isn't changing tags by hand every morning; it's letting each sunbed know what it's worth at any given moment and charge that on its own.

The same sunbed isn't worth the same as the one next to it

Let's start with the most obvious thing, and the one most often ignored: not all your spots are equal. The front row, with the bar a step away and the sunset straight ahead, is worth more than the fourth row. A shaded Balinese daybed isn't just another lounger. Each sunbed model can carry its own price, so the Balinese one charges double and the one behind it gets a keener rate, without you having to think about it twice.

And if one particular spot is special — the corner one with natural shade, the one right by the beach bar — you give it its own price without touching any of the others. It's the same logic you already use to treat each zone as a small business: the spot drives the price, not the other way around.

Half a morning or the whole day

The next layer is the hour. A sunbed at ten in the morning and that same sunbed at four in the afternoon aren't the same product: the sun changes, the crowd changes, and what someone will pay changes with them. That's why each spot can have one price for the morning, another for the afternoon, and another for the full day.

There's a detail here that pays off more than it seems: a sunbed that frees up at midday can be sold again in the afternoon. If you split the day into two time slots, you sell that same spot twice in one day — once in the morning and once in the afternoon — instead of writing it off at noon. Half a day isn't a discount; it's a second sale.

August fills itself; May needs a nudge

Here comes the big lever, the one that really moves the till: the season. You mark a period — July 1 to August 31, say — and tell the system what to do with prices on those days. You can raise everything by a percentage (50% more at the peak of summer) or just set whatever fixed price you want for those dates.

Off season, the play is the opposite. In the slow months, a scheduled discount keeps spots from going cold: better a sunbed rented cheaper than an empty one at August prices. And it doesn't have to be one-size-fits-all: you can apply the increase to just one zone or one model — mark up the Balinese daybeds in August and leave the regular loungers alone — because not all of the beach fills at the same pace.

Saturday isn't a Tuesday either

Within that season you can fine-tune even further, because a week isn't flat. On the weekend demand spikes, and on Tuesday it sinks. So you add a day-of-the-week nuance on top of the season's rate: a little extra on Saturdays and Sundays; on the slow days, a hook rate that helps you fill up.

You set it once — "in summer, Friday to Sunday, 30% more" — and it applies itself, week after week, without you having to remember to raise prices every Friday or drop them every Monday.

Set it once and it charges itself

All this flexibility would be worthless if you had to work it out by hand on every booking. The whole point is the opposite: you set it up once and forget about it. Every booking — the one that comes in through the online booking form and the one your attendant enters from their phone as the customer walks up — comes out with the right price for that sunbed, that day, and that time slot. Nobody checks a table, nobody does the math, nobody argues on the sand.

And it isn't a pricey feature reserved for a few: it's there for whenever you want to use it, like the rest of the system. You switch it on the day you decide a Saturday in August and a Tuesday in May can't cost the same.

Charging better, not charging more

The point of all this isn't to squeeze the customer; it's to stop working against yourself — to stop giving spots away when they're flying off the shelf, and to stop leaving them empty when a friendlier price would do. When the rate adjusts itself to demand, the till tells a different story at the end of the month.

Take a look at the plans and think through your own season calmly: how many genuinely strong weeks you have, how many premium spots, how many months are hard to fill. There's almost always more margin than a single price lets you see — and reclaiming it is just a matter of letting each sunbed charge what it's worth.