Sheila's Hostel and Gabriel House sit a few minutes apart in Cork and share an owner, but they sell to completely different guests. With PricePoint pricing both, Sheila's raised its average rate by 40% and Gabriel House lifted its rate while selling the same number of nights.
+40%: ADR at Sheila's Hostel, last 12 months vs the year before PricePoint
+18.9%: revenue at Sheila's, like-for-like months
+6.7%: ADR at Gabriel House in its first year, with room nights unchanged
30 min: median first reply on setup and technical support tickets
Company: Sheila's Hostel and Gabriel House, two independent properties under shared ownership in Cork, Ireland
Properties: Sheila's Hostel: dorms from 4 to 14 beds plus private rooms. Gabriel House: a luxury guesthouse overlooking the city
Challenge: Two very different products, one small team, and pricing that had to work without constant attention
Solution: PricePoint automated pricing for both properties, with regular performance reviews
PMS: Cloudbeds
On PricePoint since: Gabriel House: March 2024. Sheila's Hostel: May 2024
Sheila's Hostel is a family-owned hostel a few minutes' walk from Cork's bus and train stations, with dorms from 4 to 14 beds alongside private rooms. Gabriel House is a luxury guesthouse overlooking the city. One sells beds to backpackers who compare prices by the euro; the other sells an experience to guests who expect five-star service.
The same small team runs both, which meant pricing two very different products by hand. Demand in Cork also moves in ways a generic pricing rule misses. Gabriel House's team knew, for example, that concert-goers usually stay a single night, often midweek, while long weekends peak from Friday to Sunday with guests leaving on the Monday.
The owners were careful buyers. Before committing, they asked for three things in writing:
They also counted the cost of their own time: a trial meant hours of setup for a small team, so it had to be worth it.
Gabriel House started first, in March 2024. Its team sent PricePoint the competitors they watched and a calendar of Cork's bank holidays, concerts and events, along with how guests actually behave on those dates. PricePoint's team used that to decide which nights to lift: the whole long weekend rather than the Monday guests leave on.
Sheila's followed in spring 2024. PricePoint grouped its many dorm and private room types into a handful of groups that sell alike, each with its own starting point, and held calibration meetings with the owners until the setup matched how they wanted the hostel positioned.
“Both Sean and I can see the improvement in the last month.” — Liam Maher, Sheila's Hostel, May 2024
In February 2025, Sheila's switched off the basic pricing tool built into its PMS and handed all of its rates to PricePoint.
Sheila's average rate rose in every year on PricePoint, from €34.50 in the year before it started to €48.29 over the last 12 months: an increase of 40%.
The hostel now sells fewer, more valuable nights. Over the last 12 months, room revenue was 30.8% higher than in the year before PricePoint. That earlier year included an unusually quiet August and September, so on a like-for-like basis that leaves those two months out, revenue was still 18.9% higher, with ADR up 40.7%.
The growth hasn't stopped. Comparing the last 12 months with the 12 months before, Sheila's revenue rose 5.5% and its ADR 19.7%.
At Gabriel House the first year was about rate. Revenue rose 6.4% and ADR rose 6.7%, from €154.89 to €165.26, while the guesthouse sold almost exactly the same number of nights (9,799 against 9,824 the year before). Every extra euro came from pricing.
In 2025 the picture changed. Spring revenue slipped about 3.5% below the year before, and Gabriel House's team asked PricePoint to explain why. PricePoint's analysis found the answer in the setup, not the market: starting prices for the double rooms had drifted well above the previous year's rates, and the price floors were set so tight that the system had no room to respond when demand softened.
PricePoint recommended bringing starting prices back in line with the previous year's rates and giving the system a wider range to work with. After further adjustments in November 2025, Gabriel House stopped the slide: January 2026 revenue was 10.6% above January 2025, and revenue from January to September 2026 was level with the year before.
It is a useful lesson for any premium property: the highest price isn't always the most profitable one, and a pricing system needs room to move in both directions.
Both properties have a named PricePoint contact and regular performance reviews, now on a quarterly cycle. In mid-2026 those reviews went beyond price: PricePoint broke down Gabriel House's revenue by channel, showing direct bookings and Booking.com running close to the previous year, and that July's direct bookings were already within about €2,000 of the previous year's final total.
When something goes wrong, it gets fixed fast. Across 13 setup, technical and training tickets, the median time to a first reply was 30 minutes. In January 2026, when Sheila's manager accidentally reset all of March's rates, PricePoint replied within 12 minutes and had the rates fixed within 45.
“…it is great to work with a company where their customer service is of a high level” — Emily Maher, Manager, Sheila's Hostel, September 2026
When they signed, the owners said they would move to an annual plan after 12 successful months. In March 2026, both properties moved to annual subscriptions.
The Ryder Cup comes to Ireland in September 2027, about an hour's drive from Cork. Gabriel House's team has already marked the dates in PricePoint, and since PricePoint prices up to a year ahead, those nights are now coming into its pricing window. PricePoint is also enabling its AI Assistant for Gabriel House, so the team can ask questions about performance, trends and data directly.
