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Become a partner →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
+30.8%: room revenue at Sheila's, last 12 months vs the year before Pricepoint
+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 in Cork, Ireland, under shared ownership and run by owner-operator Liam Maher
Properties: Sheila's Hostel: a 180-bed tourist hostel open for 42 years, with dorms from 4 to 14 beds plus private rooms. Gabriel House: a 28-bedroom luxury guesthouse on Summerhill North, overlooking the city, open since 2006
Challenge: Pricing was a manual chore, so rates were set once and rarely touched, across two very different products run by one small team
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
Liam Maher owns and runs two properties a few minutes apart in Cork. Sheila's Hostel is a 180-bed tourist hostel that has been open for 42 years, a short walk from Cork's bus and train stations, with dorms from 4 to 14 beds alongside private rooms. Gabriel House is a 28-bedroom luxury guesthouse on Summerhill North, overlooking the city, which Liam has run since 2006. One sells beds to backpackers who compare prices by the euro; the other sells an experience to guests who expect five-star service. Both, as Liam puts it, are "pretty full most of the time."
Keeping rates right across both was manual work, and with the properties that busy, it rarely got done. Sheila's, with its many dorm and room types, was the hardest.
"It was a chore, there was a lot of manual work… We'd set the rate and that would be the rate, and you wouldn't go at it for forever, because it's so complicated to change." — Liam Maher, owner-operator, Gabriel House and Sheila's Hostel
Demand in Cork also moves in ways a fixed rate 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.
Liam wasn't shopping for a pricing tool. He came across Pricepoint at a hostel trade show in Amsterdam.
"I wasn't looking for it… When you go to these events, you go along with an open mind and you might spot something." — Liam Maher
The harder sell was at home. Liam's business partners were wary of adding another monthly bill on top of the tools they already paid for.
"It took me a while to convince my business partners to sign up to another recurring invoice. My PMS, which is a monthly fee, then I was putting a concierge on top of that, which is another monthly fee, and then putting a price manager on top of that." — Liam Maher
A trial period and a quick setup let the owners see the value for themselves. Liam’s forecast of the revenue growth did the rest, and the deal was done.
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.
"It's simple. It worked very well." — Liam Maher, on onboarding
In February 2025, Sheila's switched off the basic pricing tool built into its PMS and handed all of its rates to Pricepoint.
For the first two or three months, Liam checked the graphs every day. Today Valerie at Gabriel House and Emily at Sheila's keep an eye on the platform, the manual work has dropped "massively," and Liam rarely logs in at all.
"I haven't logged in for a while, it's a good sign that it's working away in the background." — Liam Maher
At Sheila’s, the change was immediate. Almost overnight, Liam stopped pricing on instinct and moved the hostel’s rates “from what I was charging to what the market was able to take.” The impact on the bottom line was just as fast.
"That was enlightening, and it's been hugely profitable." — Liam Maher
Sheila’s now sells fewer nights at higher rates. Its average daily rate (ADR) has risen every year since it started using Pricepoint, from €34.50 in the year before to €48.29 over the last 12 months, an increase of 40%. Room revenue over the last 12 months was 30.8% higher than in the year before Pricepoint. Even leaving out an unusually quiet August and September that year, revenue was still up 18.9%.
"I'm flabbergasted at how the price has changed. There's employees over in Sheila's who have been working in Sheila's since before Pricepoint came in, and they sometimes struggle with selling a dorm bed at €90 on a Saturday night. But it works, and people look for it." — Liam Maher
Gabriel House was already well priced, so the goal was to get more from every night. In its first year on Pricepoint, ADR rose 6.7%, from €154.89 to €165.26, and revenue grew 6.4% on almost exactly the same number of nights. Every extra euro came from smarter pricing.
Pricepoint’s regular reviews keep that pricing sharp. After the team fine-tuned starting prices and gave the system a wider range to work with, January 2026 revenue came in 10.6% above the January before.
For premium properties, the highest price isn’t always the most profitable one. The best results come from a pricing system with 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.
"Ever since I got on board, I haven't looked back. I've had a great relationship with Alejandro." — Liam Maher
When something goes wrong, it gets fixed fast. Support tickets typically get a first reply within 30 minutes. When a property’s rates for a whole month were accidentally reset, Pricepoint replied within minutes and had everything restored in under an hour.
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. Other pricing tools have pitched Liam since, but he isn't interested in switching.
"They've been hounding me since. I've been happy with where we're at and not wanting to change." — Liam Maher
For Liam, the next test is winter. July and August income barely moves from one year to the next; the quiet months are where he sees room to grow.
"The most important four months for me is the next four months: November, December, January, February. It's where income is low. It's where occupancy is low… Where I can drive the income is November, December, January, February. Those four months where I think we need to be really clever in how we attract business." — Liam Maher
Liam has asked Pricepoint for advice on how far to lower target rates over the off-season to keep bookings coming in.
Further out, 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.
"Absolutely. Go for it." — Liam Maher
"Happy. Very happy with it, to be fair." — Liam Maher
