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How to check your calendar against your venues in ten minutes

You do not need any software to find unpriced events in your market. You need a list of the right websites and about ten minutes a week. This is the exact routine our scanner automates, written out so you can run it by hand.

Step 1: list your venues once

Five kinds of places generate multi-night demand and publish their own schedules: the convention or expo center, the fairgrounds, the chamber of commerce or CVB events calendar, any sports complex that hosts tournaments, and any conference hotel or resort with an events page. Most markets have two to four that matter. Finding them is one search each: your town's name plus "convention center events", "fairgrounds calendar", "chamber events". Bookmark them. This list changes maybe once a year.

Step 2: read the feed, not the page

Many venue sites quietly publish machine-readable versions of their calendars that are faster to scan than the page itself:

If the site runs WordPress with an events plugin, add ?ical=1 to the end of the events page URL (for example /events/list/?ical=1). You get a plain-text file where every entry has an explicit start and end date. If the venue uses the carbonhouse platform (many arenas and convention centers do), try /events/rss: a compact feed with dates and the venue's own event-type labels. If neither works, the page itself is fine; you are only looking for names and date ranges.

Step 3: apply the two filters

For each event in the next 90 days ask two questions. Does it span nights? A Friday-to-Sunday show means two or three booked nights per attendee; a Tuesday evening meeting means none. Is it sold through a ticket platform? If the event links to a major ticketing site, your market has already seen it and your comps have already moved, so skip it. What survives both filters is the list that matters: multi-day, no ticket trail.

Step 4: check those dates against your calendar

Open your own next 90 nights next to the surviving list. For each event, look at your rate on those nights. If it is the same as the surrounding weeks, you have found a night that will probably fill at a price that was set for an empty one. What to do about it is its own subject: a short, honest guide here.

The honest cost of doing this by hand

Ten minutes a week is real, and so is the failure mode: the week you skip is the week the rodeo books out. We publish free, no-signup findings pages that run this exact routine daily for a growing list of markets, with a source link under every line so you can check our work. If your market is on the list, bookmark it instead of the venue pages. If it is not, a market is added when a real, verifiable calendar source exists for it, and if you have properties in several markets, signing up puts the findings for all of them on one dashboard with a text on the days something changes.