Pricing Your Short-Let for Detty December

If you own or run a short-let in Lagos, the next ten weeks decide a disproportionate share of your year. Not because December is busy, which you already know, but because almost every decision that determines what you earn in December has to be made before the bookings arrive.

The calendar you open in October is the calendar guests book. The rate you set now is the rate you are stuck with on the nights that matter most.

How big the season actually got

This is not a normal seasonal bump. Consumer spending across the season went from ₦111.5bn to ₦396.54bn in a single year, and roughly 55% of it came from diaspora visitors. For the first time, US arrivals overtook UK arrivals.

What that means for a host is specific. Your December guest is disproportionately likely to be flying in from Atlanta or Houston rather than London, booking a longer stay than your usual guest, and making the decision weeks or months before arrival.

What rates actually did

A fifty to sixty-seven per cent uplift is the realistic band for a standard two-bedroom. Note that the biggest jump was on the island, where competition is fiercest. Scarcity is not evenly distributed.

Treat those as the floor of what is achievable rather than a target. Reporting on the 2025 season described rates in Lekki Phase 1 and Oniru doubling or tripling in the peak weeks between 15 December and 5 January.

Open your calendar now, not in November

This is the single most common mistake, and it is expensive in a way that is invisible.

Diaspora guests book flights between roughly May and August, before the airline holiday surcharges land in September. Accommodation follows the flight, not the other way round. By the time you open your December availability in mid-November, a large share of the highest-value guests have already committed somewhere else.

The nights you never listed do not show up anywhere. You cannot see them in your dashboard. They simply were not available to be booked.

If your December is not open and priced today, that is the first thing to fix after reading this.

Decide your minimum stay deliberately

December guests book long. The typical diaspora stay runs ten to twenty-eight nights, and total spend of three million naira and above on accommodation alone is common.

A seven-night minimum sounds protective but can work against you. It blocks a fourteen-night booking from fitting neatly around a shorter one and leaves you with orphan nights nobody wants. Look at how your specific calendar fragments before you set it.

The twenty-eight night line changes your policy entirely

This is the part most hosts do not know, and it matters more in December than at any other time of year because December is when long bookings actually happen.

On LibraX, a booking of twenty-eight nights or more does not use the Flexible, Standard or Strict tiers at all. It falls under a separate long-term framework, and the refund logic is completely different.

Under the long-term rules, the guest has a 48 hour window after booking in which they can cancel for a full refund. Once that closes, the first thirty nights are non-refundable regardless of when they cancel, and only unused nights beyond the first thirty come back to them. If the guest books when check-in is thirteen days or fewer away, the 48 hour window does not apply at all.

The practical consequence is that a thirty-night December booking is far more secure for you than three separate ten-night bookings, because after the first two days the guest is committed to a month. If you are weighing a single long booking against a chain of short ones at a slightly better nightly rate, that security is worth real money. The full detail is in the Guest Cancellation Policy, and we walked through the tiers in choosing the right cancellation policy for your listing.

Price the peak without torching your reputation

There is a real and growing backlash against December pricing in Nigeria, and it is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing.

Femi Fadina, national president of the Association of Tourism Practitioners of Nigeria, put it bluntly when he described operators attempting to extract a year’s profit within a single month, and warned that luxury pricing gets attached to average service.

That second half is the part hosts should sit with. Guests do not object to paying December rates. They object to paying December rates for an apartment that was priced for February. A tripled rate creates a tripled expectation, and the review you get in January is written against the price you charged.

So if you are going to price at the top of the band, spend something on the experience before you do. Fresh linen rather than the set from last year. Actual water pressure. A stocked kitchen. Someone reachable at midnight. The gap between price and delivery is what generates the one-star review that costs you all of next year.

Whatever you do, do not cancel a confirmed booking

Every December, some hosts accept a booking in October, watch rates climb through November, and start looking for a way out so they can re-let at the higher price.

This is the most expensive mistake available to you.

Under the Host Cancellation Policy, cancelling a confirmed reservation means you receive no payout for it, the guest receives a full refund including all fees and taxes, and a cancellation fee is deducted from your next payout. The fee scales with lateness: 5% more than fourteen days out, 10% between seven and fourteen days, 15% inside seven days, and 25% of the unstayed nights if you cancel on check-in day or after. There is a floor of ₦30,000 regardless of the booking’s value.

And the escape route does not work anyway. LibraX may block your calendar on the affected dates specifically so cancelled nights cannot be immediately re-listed at a higher price. You lose the booking, pay the fee, and still cannot sell the night.

Pressuring a guest to cancel on your behalf is treated as a platform standards violation in its own right, so that route is worse rather than better.

The correct response to rates rising after you accepted a booking is to have priced better in October.

What to do in the next two weeks

Open December and early January availability today. Through to at least 5 January, since the peak window runs past new year.

Set your peak rate now. Start from a fifty per cent uplift on your normal rate and adjust for your specific area and property. Island properties support more.

Decide your minimum stay against how your calendar actually fragments, not by instinct.

Reshoot your photographs if they are more than a year old or if you have replaced furniture since. December guests are comparing you against a lot of listings at once, and the research on what listing photos do to bookings is unambiguous.

Service the generator and the air conditioners in October. Not in December, when every technician in Lagos is booked and charging accordingly.

Line up your cleaner for the turnarounds and agree December rates with them in advance. They know it is peak season too.

Stock consumables early. Prices rise in December along with everything else.

Sources

Season spending, diaspora share and arrivals: BusinessDay, which also carries the remarks by Femi Fadina of the Association of Tourism Practitioners of Nigeria.

Nightly rates and occupancy: Nairametrics, 9 January 2026.

Booking windows and peak-week pricing: Tribune Online, 29 July 2026.