Author: Jae Seok An

3 Things to look for when choosing the best Airbnb dynamic pricing tool

Post author By Jae Seok An
Post date January 10, 2022

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Dynamic pricing tools adjust your pricing depending on market demands to maximize rental revenue. Airbnb already offers this with their Airbnb Smart Pricing. But while many Airbnb hosts tried Airbnb Smart Pricing, they quickly realize the tool set their prices too low. It’s no wonder that many avid Airbnb hosts rely on third-party dynamic pricing tools to meet their needs.

A well-designed dynamic pricing software should give you the flexibility to set custom pricing rules based on the market supply and demand data they have. It should allow you to transparently see the market data they are basing their pricing recommendations on, and it should be adjustable if you don’t agree with them. Other important things to consider are whether they support your market and your PMS if you use one.

The six dynamic pricing tools currently in the market are:

Airbtics Bright Pricing
AirDNA Smart Rates
Beyond
DPGO
PriceLabs
WheelHouse

Here’s a quick rundown of these tools

Airbtics Bright Pricing offers highly customizable pricing settings and covers all markets in the world.

AirDNA is a market intelligence software with a pricing recommendation feature covering all markets globally.

Beyond Pricing is a San Francisco-based dynamic pricing tool founded in 2014 – it offers integration with over 50 PMS and their product is suitable for professional vacation rental managers.

DPGO is a relatively new software offering highly customizable pricing settings with an intuitive user interface.

PriceLabs employees are based in India and Chicago – it offers integration with over 50 PMS and their product is intuitive and easy to use.

WheelHouse is another San Francisco VC-funded company offering experimental features and is built by PhD holders.

Custom Pricing Rules

Top Recommendations: Airbtics Bright Pricing, DPGO

Runner up: PriceLabs

Both Airbtics Bright Pricing and DPOG are relatively new software, yet they offer the most amount of flexibility on top of their pricing algorithms. If you don’t completely trust the AI recommended rates, this is a crucial feature.

Last-minute discount

There’s no doubt that you need to lower nightly rates as it gets closer to the date. Yet, when and how much to give a discount is depending on your market and guest type. For instance, if you are running a hotel in a busy street, you may not need to lower the price until the evening of that day as the majority of your booking may happen during that time. However, if your vacation cabin is located in a mountain with a low population density, most people will book well in advance. When to start lowering the price and how aggressively you’d like to give a discount should be at least configurable.

If you’d like to fine-tune your last-minute discount, we recommend you to use DPGO or Airbtics Bright Pricing.

Day of the week or seasonality

It’s not a secret that weekend pricing is higher than weekday pricing, yet depending on many factors, the day-of-the-week pricing needs to be adjusted. Typically, in a market that heavily relies on vacation tourists, weekday occupancy rates will be significantly lower than the weekend, and you may want to set pricing aggressively during the weekday and conservatively for the weekend. For the same reason, you may want to play different pricing strategies in different seasons.

These are common features offered by all dynamic pricing providers.

Competitor based pricing

Being able to set a custom pricing rule based on competitors is what an ultimate dynamic pricing software should look like, even better if they show the competitor lists and allow you to edit them. This is what we are developing at Airbtics currently, but PriceLabs provides something similar. It allows you to set a rule to drop or increase prices if the market’s occupancy rates hit certain thresholds.

PMS connectivity

Top recommendations: Beyond, PriceLabs, Wheelhouse

Runner ups: DPGO

The first three tools started their service in 2014, hence they support various PMS like Guesty, Lodgify, and so on. AirDNA and Airbtics only support connecting with your Airbnb – AirDNA changes pricing to iCAL and Airbtics directly changes on Airbnb.

Market coverage

Top recommendations: Airbtics, AirDNA

Runner ups: DPGO, PriceLabs

According to our analysis, Beyond and Wheelhouse only cover major cities. When our analysts tried using it for less known locations, we got the notifications that the markets are not available. DPGO and PriceLabs cover the markets we tested. Both Airbtics and AirDNA, being market intelligence software, cover worldwide markets regardless of the location.

Summary

There’s no evidence that a specific software will increase the highest amount of revenue, but we’ve tried our best to address important points you need to consider when it comes to choosing a smart pricing tool.

All the solutions (apart from AirDNA) give you a free trial. Should you try them all out, you’ll have five months to find out which one is the best for you.

But if you want to save time switching and learning new tools, you should take a look at 1) whether they support all of your listings 2) whether they have integration with your PMS and 3) whether they allow you to override your current pricing strategy on top of their software.

Tags hostBlogs, seeall

Hosting Tips

Wheelhouse Pricing In-depth Review: A VC-funded vacation rental technology, is it any good?

Post author By Jae Seok An
Post date December 30, 2021

Wheelhouse and why am I eligible to give a review

Wheelhouse Pricing was founded in 2014 by Andrew Kitchell, a co-founder of Beyond Pricing, which is another similar Airbnb dynamic pricing tool. As a tech-savvy Airbnb host, I have tried out all the dynamic pricing solutions available in the market.

This short blog will show you some customer reviews of Wheelhouse and my technical review on this pricing tool as well. A list of good alternatives will be at the bottom as well.

A side note: I tried it out for a couple of months for my rentals in London and Sokcho (Korea). Even though Wheelhouse was built by an ex-CEO of Beyond Pricing, I prefer Wheelhouse slightly more, and I will explain this in the blog.

Product Features

Dynamic Price: Ease of use?

To get started, you need to set Base Price, and you are given three pre-defined choices, which are powered by the Wheelhouse Pricing algorithm.

Once you select the pricing strategy choice, you can start pushing the pricing suggestions to your listings.

Custom Price Settings

It’s a critical feature and usually, it is the deciding factor of choosing the right short-term rental dynamic pricing tool, since every markets and listing have unique demands and customers patterns.

You can further improve Wheelhouse’s pre-defined pricing strategy within the following parameters

Minimum and maximum prices based on day of the week and specific range of dates
Weekend pricing
Seasonal pricing
Long-term discount
Last-minute discount
Far Future premium

Wheelhouse gives plenty of options for you to customize pricing strategies based on their template. Being able to give a further premium for weekend pricing is a handy feature because many vacation rentals are only filled during the weekend but not during the weekday. You may set your base price relatively low for the weekdays and set more competitive rates for weekends to optimize your pricing. This exact feature is why I prefer Wheelhouse over Beyond Pricing.

Market Insights

One interesting market data they are showing is their market pricing recommendations. They have three different models 1) Recommended 2) Reactive and 3) Predictive. However, as a non-professional Airbnb host, I barely understand them and know what models will give me more bookings. I don’t want to test out their three different models as I simply want to increase revenue and get more bookings today!

Competitive Sets

It’s an analytics dashboard showing the stats of your competitors.

The following data is available

Key Metrics, such as average occupancy rate, nightly rate, and booking lead time
Competitor’s daily rates over next 365 days

Booking lead time is a useful data point to know, as well as the ability to edit the pre-made CompSet. However, unlike Bright Pricing, it doesn’t show the breakdown of key metrics. For example, Bright Pricing shows a breakdown of key metrics in more granular form, such as next 7 days, 14 days, 21 days, or in percentile.

Pricing

The cost of using Wheelhouse Pricing is 1% of revenue or $20/mo per listing.

How does it compare with others?

PriceLabs: $20 or $10 / month

Bright Pricing: 0.5% of revenue

DPGO: 0.5% of revenue

Beyond Pricing: 1% of revenue

Existing Customer’s Wheelhouse Review

1. Trustpilot

2. G2

3. Capterra

Wheelshouse Contact & Support - Click to Expand

One Embarcadero Center, Unit 26859

San Francisco, CA, USA 94126

Email Address: [email protected]

Conclusion

As someone who managed up to 10 listings at a time as an individual part-time Airbnb host, I liked Wheelhoue’s customized rule options. Their Competitive Sets dashboard stood out amongst their competitors. There market future pricing graphs are interesting but not sure whether a non-professional Airbnb host can leverage it correctly.

In 2022, there are more new dynamic pricing tools out there. I’d like to introduce you to Bright Pricing – it’s built by software engineers and the pricing engine is based on Airbtics’ 2 billion short-term rental nightly rates data. Bright Pricing has some advantages over Wheelhouse. 1) it’s four times cheaper 2) you can adjust your competitors 3) the market dashboard is fantastic 4) and it supports all locations in the world.

PriceLabs in-depth technical reviews – (From software developer & Airbnb host perspective)

Tags hostBlogs, seeall

Hosting Tips

Beyond Pricing In-depth review: Still useful in 2022?

Post author By Jae Seok An
Post date December 30, 2021

Why am I eligible to give a Beyond Pricing Review?

When Beyond Pricing (now just called Beyond) was launched back in 2014, it drew a lot of Airbnb Hosts’ attention. It is one of the three dynamic pricing tools out there at that time. They are based in San Francisco and have secured Series-A funding.

I also tried out Beyond for a couple of months for my rentals in London and Sokcho (Korea).

Sadly, it didn’t support listings in Sokcho! They cover most of the markets in the US but they are missing many less-known vacation destinations in the rest of the world. Regardless, I connected my UK listings with Beyond and my first impression of their user interface was delightful! Well, I will also tell you about my last impression later in this blog.

I’ll try my best to show as many reviews of existing customers and their overall thoughts on Beyond. Also, I’ll list down all the features to help you get started. A list of good alternatives will be at the bottom as well that have recently been providing more accurate data and great service.

What Is Beyond?

Beyond is a dynamic pricing tool with a market insight dashboard and a direct website builder (Known as Signal). They use their proprietary AI algorithm to determine the right pricing for your short-term rentals and update your pricing automatically. Just like Uber’s surge pricing, if your market demand changes rapidly, the Beyond Pricing engine will adjust your pricing accordingly. It can be useful for both professional and casual Airbnb hosts.

For casual Airbnb hosts, you are not likely to have in-depth market knowledge, so this specialized tool will set better pricing for your rental so that you make more money. The best thing is it only takes a few minutes to set up, so compared to your time-invested, it has a good ROI. (E.g. You only need to spend 25 minutes to set dynamic pricing and it can give you 1 additional booking/mo)

For professional hosts, you will have to override their pricing rules frequently since you have your data and system, but it can sometimes catch events that your company didn’t know. It will be a good addition to further optimize your pricing.