Hotel Dynamic Pricing Lessons for Charge Point Operators

A hotel room that stays empty tonight cannot be sold tomorrow. A fast charger that stands idle at two in the afternoon has the same problem, and most charging operators still price it as if every hour were worth the same. Hotels stopped doing that decades ago. The way they price rooms is a practical template for pricing charging sessions, including the parts they got wrong.

How do hotels price rooms, and what does that teach charging operators?

Hotels price each night separately, by guest segment and by the moment of booking, with the goal of maximising revenue per available room rather than filling every room. Revenue management is the practice of selling perishable, fixed capacity to the right customer at the right moment and price, using a demand forecast instead of a single list price. For charging operators the lesson is direct: a charging hour is perishable capacity, demand differs sharply by hour and by customer type, and a tariff that responds to that demand earns more per connector than a flat price. Hotels also learned that controlling how long a guest stays matters as much as the rate itself. Both lessons apply to a connector.

Why is an idle charging hour the same problem as an empty room?

Both are fixed capacity that expires if nobody uses it. Sheryl Kimes and Richard Chase describe yield management in the Journal of Service Research (1998) as managing four Cs: calendar (how far ahead customers book), clock (the time of day), capacity and cost (the price), in order to manage a fifth C, customer demand. They sum up the core idea as "an hour is not an hour is not an hour".

A charging site fits that frame closely. The number of connectors is fixed for years. The grid connection is paid whether or not a car is plugged in. Demand on a motorway hub on a Friday evening has little in common with demand on the same hub on a Tuesday morning. The question is not whether the capacity is perishable. It is whether your price knows that.

Which hotel levers have a direct equivalent at a charger?

Most of them. The table below maps the standard hotel levers to what they look like on a public charging site.

The fit is not perfect. Most charging demand is still walk-in, so the booking window is short. But segmentation, duration and fences transfer almost one to one.

Why is a full hotel not automatically a profitable hotel?

Because occupancy and revenue can move in opposite directions. The hotel industry measures RevPAR, revenue per available room, which combines occupancy with the average rate. According to MKG Consulting figures for July 2025, French hotels gained 2.3 occupancy points compared with July 2024, while the average daily rate fell 8% and RevPAR dropped 5%. More rooms were sold, and the hotels earned less.

Charging operators fall into the same trap when utilisation becomes the target. An example with round, illustrative numbers: a connector sells 6 hours a day at 30 euros per hour of charging, which is 180 euros a day. A blanket discount lifts it to 8 hours at 21 euros, which is 168 euros. Utilisation went up by a third and revenue went down. The useful metric is revenue per available connector hour, the charging version of RevPAR. We covered the break-even side of this in the post on utilisation and break-even.

Where did hotels get revenue management wrong?

Hotels made two mistakes that charging operators can skip. The first was pricing one night at a time. Kimes and Chase note that traditional hotels forecast nightly occupancy and ignored length of stay. Chains such as Marriott improved by forecasting arrivals by length of stay and rate, so they could accept the set of bookings that earned the most over several nights. The charging version is a session that blocks a fast charger for an hour after the battery is nearly full. Duration control, through idle fees or a time component after a set point, belongs in the tariff design from day one.

The second mistake was top-down pricing. Reservation agents quoted the highest rate first and moved down when the guest resisted. Kimes and Chase report that customers view this practice unfavourably. The charging lesson is that a price should follow a published rule, not a negotiation. Under the EU AFIR regulation, the ad hoc price has to be shown to the driver before the session starts. A dynamic tariff that is fixed at the moment the driver plugs in, within a known floor and ceiling, meets that standard. A price that changes mid-session does not.

What does a modern hotel pricing system actually use?

Segmentation and a price elasticity model, not intuition. Marriott's Group Pricing Optimizer, described by Hormby and colleagues in Interfaces (2010), recommends rates for group requests using demand segmentation, price elasticity modelling and optimisation. It has been in use since late 2006. The point for charging operators is the architecture: a forecast of demand per segment, an estimate of how that segment reacts to price, and an optimiser that looks for the most profitable rate within limits set by people.

This is also where energy prices come in. A tariff that only passes on the spot price plus a fixed margin has no demand model at all. It ignores who is charging and when, and it exposes your full margin to market volatility. That makes it unsuitable as a base or roaming tariff. It works well as a discount layer for members and subscribers, in the same way a hotel loyalty rate sits under the best available rate. The public price stays demand-aware. Members get a transparent energy-linked discount on top of it.

What would you change on Monday?

Start with the hotel habits that cost nothing to copy:

• Report revenue per available connector hour next to utilisation, and stop treating a full site as proof of a good price.
• Split your week into a handful of demand blocks and price each block separately, with a floor and a ceiling.
• Add a duration rule for sessions that keep a fast charger busy after the car is effectively full.
• Move energy-linked pricing into a member rate instead of the public tariff.
• Fix the price at the start of each session and publish the rule, so the driver knows where they stand.

What we see on our own public chargers matches what hotels learned: the length of a session matters as much as the price per kWh. Airlines went through a similar shift, which we described in airline revenue management lessons for charging. If you want to see how demand-aware tariffs, member layers and duration rules fit together, see how the Proxilink platform works or start with a free potential analysis of your site.