Not necessarily. When two classes have fundamentally different levels of demand, keeping them at the same price is rarely a strategic decision — it is usually a default that stayed in place after the timetable became more complex. If the market is telling you that one moment is more valuable than another, your pricing should at least reflect that conversation.
Most boutique studios never actually chose one flat price. It arrived with the first timetable and stayed because nobody had a reason to touch it. Then the studio grew, some slots became reliably full and others reliably were not, and the price stopped matching what was actually happening in the room.
The decision that never got made
Walk your own timetable for a fortnight and you will usually find the same pattern: the 6pm class is booked out three days before it runs, the 6am class the day before is half empty. Ask most owners why the price is identical for both and the honest answer is that it was never a question. The founder set one number when the studio opened, and every class since has inherited it.
That is not a mistake, it is a decision that has never been made, sitting where a decision should be. A studio with one class and one instructor does not need a pricing strategy. A studio with a full week of varied classes, running at very different capacities, has an active pricing decision in front of it every week, whether anyone is looking at it or not.
Why flat pricing quietly costs you twice
Flat pricing does not fail gently. It fails in two directions at once, and most owners only notice one of them.
The obvious cost sits in the popular slot. If your 6pm class sells out reliably, my rule is that you are pricing below what the market has already told you it will pay. Every sold-out class is a data point, not just a success metric. It tells you there is more demand for that particular moment than the current price is capturing, and the question becomes whether that additional value should be reflected in pricing, membership structure or access rules.
The quieter cost sits in the empty slot. A 6am class running at a third full is not an unfortunate fact of early mornings. It is a class asked to justify its full price without the demand to support it, and most clients booking that time are making a genuinely different decision than the ones booking peak: price-sensitive, schedule-constrained, or simply testing the studio before committing. Charging them the same as the client who will fight for a 6pm spot ignores that they are not the same buyer.
Picture a studio owner staring at two numbers on the same spreadsheet: a 6pm class waitlisted every week and a 6am class that has not sold out once this quarter. Same instructor cost, same room, same forty-five minutes. The only variable that has never moved is the one thing she actually controls.
What differential pricing actually solves
Differential pricing (charging different amounts for the same class format depending on when it runs) is not complicated. It is closer to what a restaurant does with a lunch set menu against a Saturday dinner service, or an airline does with a seat that costs more on the flight everyone wants. The product is functionally the same. The price reflects what the moment is worth to the person buying it.
For a studio, that means two decisions rather than one great leap. First: does the popular slot carry room to raise price without losing bookings? A small increase on new bookings only, protected for existing members on renewal, is usually the gentlest way to find out. Second: does the quiet slot need a lower price to build volume, or something else entirely, a different format, a different instructor, or honest retirement from the timetable? Cutting the price of an underused slot only works if the underlying demand exists at a lower number. Sometimes it does not, and no price will fix a class nobody wants at that hour.
Neither decision is about maximising revenue for its own sake. It is about pricing matching what is actually happening, rather than a number set once and never revisited.
Where this sits, and where it does not
This is a pricing question, not a retention question. Whether clients stay is a separate mechanism with its own drivers, and folding the two together is how studios end up making a retention fix with a pricing tool, or the reverse. It is also not a brand positioning question: what you charge for a slot is a commercial calculation about demand at that hour, what your studio stands for in the market is a different, longer conversation. Keep them separate and each gets easier to reason about.
Where it does connect to something bigger is the studio's wider commercial and marketing model: how you price a class sits alongside how you promote it and how a prospective client finds you in the first place. Pricing decisions made in isolation from the rest of that thinking are usually a sign the studio has never had a proper look at its digital and marketing precision as one connected system.
The test before you change anything
Before touching a single price, look at three weeks of your own booking data by class time, not by class type. You are looking for a consistent gap between two slots running the same format, not a one-off busy week or a single quiet Bank Holiday. If the gap holds, you have a real signal. If it does not, you have noise, and changing price on noise just adds confusion to a system that was working fine.
My rule with studio owners looking at this for the first time is simple: change one variable at a time, on new bookings only, and give it a full month before drawing any conclusion. A pricing change tested for a week tells you nothing except how your most price-sensitive clients react to sudden change, which is the least useful group to learn from first.
FAQ
Does charging more for popular classes risk losing loyal clients?
It can, if it is applied badly. The lowest-risk approach protects existing members at their current rate on renewal and applies any change to new bookings only. Loyal clients rarely leave over a fair, well-communicated change, they leave over surprise, over feeling the studio changed the deal on them without warning.
Should every class have a different price?
No. Most studios need two or three price bands at most, tied to genuine, sustained demand differences, not a different number for every single slot on the timetable. A pricing structure nobody can explain in one sentence is already too complicated to run.
What if the 6am class is quiet because of the time, not the price?
Then a lower price will not fix it, and you should not assume it will. Some slots are structurally limited by who is awake and able to attend at that hour, and the honest answer might be a different format, a different instructor, or accepting that slot will always run lighter than peak.
How do I know if my demand gap is real or seasonal?
Look at a full quarter if you can, not a few isolated weeks. A genuine time-of-day gap holds through a full cycle of the timetable; a seasonal dip narrows or disappears as the season changes.
Gaia Gabiati, Consulting Lead at The Boutique Consultancy. A decade across health clubs, private members' clubs, hospitality, wellness and multi-site aesthetics clinics, from Milan through Harvey Nichols, Virgin Active, Third Space and Soho House, to running the operational side of multi-site luxury aesthetics clinics.