Most hotel tech companies set their list price once, early, when they were desperate for logos. Years later the product does three times as much, the team is bigger, and new hotels still pay what the first ten did. Nobody changes it, because raising prices feels risky and no one owns the decision.

New-customer list prices are the safest price to change. No existing hotel sees a bigger invoice, nobody churns, and you learn quickly whether the market accepts it. The question is when. This framework gives you five gates to check, in order, before you change the number.

Why list price and realised price are different problems

List price is what you publish or quote first; realised price is what hotels actually pay after discounts, incentives and free months. Raising the first does nothing if the second does not move. Simon-Kucher's 2025 Global Pricing Study, which surveyed more than 2,200 business leaders across 28 countries, found that companies realise less than half the amount of their price increases on average. A Reuters Plus feature on the study puts it more precisely: only 43% of planned price increases survived discounting and negotiation, and only 68% of companies demonstrated genuine pricing power by raising prices beyond their own cost increases. Technology, media and telecommunications scored 71%.

Hotel tech has a public example of list price and realised price moving in different directions at once. In its half-year report to December 2025, SiteMinder said subscription ARPU rose 4.5% to $257 a month, reflecting price increases, upselling and customer mix, partially offset by short-term incentives used to attract larger hotels. Monthly revenue churn held at 1.0% in both periods. Prices went up and incentives went out in the same half, for a deliberate reason: winning bigger properties.

The Five-Gate List Price Framework

Work through the gates in order. If a gate fails, fix that first; raising the list price on top of it will either not stick or will hurt win rates for reasons that have nothing to do with price.

Gate 1: Win-rate headroom

Start with your own data. Take the last two or three quarters of qualified opportunities, those that passed discovery, and calculate win rate by segment. Then look at why you lost. If you win a high share of qualified deals and price is rarely the main closed-lost reason, buyers are telling you the price is not where the friction is. If your closed-lost tagging is too loose to answer this, fix that before anything else.

Pass: high qualified win rate, price a minor loss reason. Fail: price is the top loss reason, or you cannot tell.

Gate 2: Discount discipline

If reps give 20% to every hotel that asks, a higher list price will mostly produce a higher discount. Check the share of deals closed with a discount, the average depth, and whether a manager approves anything above a set threshold. The Simon-Kucher finding that less than half of price increases are realised is largely a discounting story. Our guide to deciding between a discount and walking away sets out the rules.

Pass: written discount rules that are followed. Fail: discounting is habitual or unapproved.

Gate 3: Value added since the last price

List all the modules, integrations, support hours and outcomes you have added since the price was last set. A new channel connection, an RMS feature, a payments product, a dedicated onboarding specialist. If the product today is materially more than what the old price bought, the increase is a re-pricing of new value, not a tax on the same product, and your sales team can say so.

Pass: a short, concrete list of new value buyers care about. Fail: the product is largely unchanged.

Gate 4: Market movement

Check where competitors' public prices sit and where software prices are heading. Software buyers are used to increases. Vertice, which tracks SaaS inflation from purchasing data, reported a record 16.4% in June 2026, easing to 12.7% in August before early September data showed 14.3%. That is a benchmark for what buyers are seeing elsewhere, not a target for your increase.

In hotel software, many competitors publish entry prices. Little Hotelier's pricing page, for example, shows a Basics plan from $39 USD a month plus a 1% booking fee and a Pro plan from $179 USD a month. If your list sits well below comparable published prices while offering similar scope, the market has room; see our guide to what a hotel tech pricing page should do.

Pass: you are at or below comparable offers for similar scope. Fail: you are already the most expensive option without a clear reason.

Gate 5: Protection for the base and the pipeline

Before you announce anything, decide what happens to existing customers and open deals. For a new-customer-only change, existing hotels keep their price until you make a separate decision, which is covered in raising prices on existing hotel customers. Open quotes are honoured until expiry. Partners and resellers get notice and new price sheets first.

Pass: a written policy for customers, quotes and partners. Fail: sales will learn about the change from a prospect.

The framework at a glance

How to roll out a new-customer list price

1. Pick one segment first. Change the price for the segment that passed Gate 1 most clearly, such as group deals or a region, and leave others alone for a quarter.

2. Set a date and tell the pipeline. Give open opportunities a clear deadline to sign at the current price. A real deadline often pulls deals forward.

3. Update every surface on the same day. Pricing page, quote templates, partner price sheets and the sales deck. A prospect who finds an old price on a reseller's site will ask for it.

4. Train the team on the value list. Reps should explain the change with Gate 3's list, not apologise for it. Our guide to what hoteliers mean when they say too expensive helps here.

5. Watch three numbers for two quarters. Qualified win rate, average discount and sales cycle length, compared with the same period a year earlier because of hotel seasonality.

Sequencing new customers before existing ones is common practice in software. SaaStr reported that Google applied its Gemini bundling and pricing change to new Workspace customers in January 2025 and existing customers in March 2025. The same report lists Slack's Business+ plan moving from $12.50 to $15 per user per month for renewals after August 17, 2025. Large vendors stage increases; smaller hotel tech companies can do the same at lower risk.

When not to raise list prices

• Win rates are already falling and price is the top stated loss reason.

• You are in the middle of a push into a new segment where you have no reference properties yet.

• Your onboarding or support has known problems that hotels mention in reviews.

• You cannot yet tell whether the problem is price or sales; check pricing problem or sales problem first.

Pricing is one lever in a full hotel tech go-to-market strategy, and it works best when the pricing model itself fits how hotels buy.

The takeaway

Raise new-customer list prices when you win qualified deals easily, discounting is under control, the product has clearly grown, the market has room and your base and pipeline are protected. If any gate fails, fix it first, because a higher list price on top of loose discounting mostly creates bigger discounts.

If you suspect your list price is leaving money on the table, a free revenue leak audit will show whether the leak is in the price, the discounting or the deals you are losing.

Frequently Asked Questions