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There is one company called Beyond Pricing who automatically change your price, I’m guessing on a daily basis to help you get the best possible price, but they do not cover my area.
Do you use a automatic pricing company? Airbnb having smart price, but I find that’s often too low and would like a company to do it who also are aware of demand in this specific area.
For an hour of your time – I assume you have an hour to spend on your money-maker – you can set you own prices on a daily basis for your own local holidays, events, etc for the next year. Save yourself some money.
I am using pricelabs.
I spend five minutes a week reviewing my prices.
Basically I set a base price and my mimimum, it’s adapting the price depending the demand in my area.
It’s really saving me a lot of time and would correspond to what I can do alone but it will requiere me to spend a lot of time on changing price.
Do you believe it has increased your bookings and/or revenue?
Basically it’s saving me a lot of time as I was already getting demand in my area from an other channel.
But if you don’t have the demande from your area, it’s increasing booking and revenue in my opinion.
Why? Do you not live in an area affected by seasonal rates, high holidays etc?
For only 1% and for hopefully very well informed and studied information to determine the price, I was thinking a company would be worth the money.
Excellent! Thanks! What convinced you to use them?
It was the only one that is working for my city.
edit: for information for my price is in low season last minute 600 sek night, for high season it’s getting to 2000 sek so it’s quite a big difference between season, events etc…
I do not use an automatic pricing company.
I thought I’d share an interesting experience though. This summer we went to the olympics in Rio. When I started looking for an airbnb to stay in it became apparent that airbnb had set a “special olympic pricing”.
Under these circumstances it would make sense to use Airbnb or another companies recommended pricing scale.
margaret
perhaps “set pricing” is the wrong wording, but guidance as to what could be an acceptable rate for those specific dates.
I use Airbnb’s Smart Pricing which, once you’ve ‘educated’ it, ups prices to more than I’d dare charge. And people book at those prices.
Subscribe to emails from your locality and you’ll get to know about local events that pricing services don’t. Spend five minutes increasing your prices for those events. Easy :).
I’m still unsure what data these automatic pricing companies actually use, what information do they have to determine what price to set? I guess fairly basic things like Airbnb results for your area, how much others are charging. I would hope they are also aware of special local events that will increase demand also. I’m sticking to manually changing the price by myself until I feel the price of automatic pricing is worth it, as it can be expensive.
How do you ‘educate’ it? I’ve found it prices too low for my area. Smart pricing is a good idea, but makes it too cheap for my liking.
The ideal scenario though, is long term bookings, so not at the highest rate, but not low either.
When I first started using SP, it invariably set the price to the minimum I’d set. (I think it was $122 per night). So I would change it manually. I also changed it for events and other dates that are traditionally in high demand.
Until I started doing that, it made no allowance for the fact that the winter months are high season here - it ‘assumed’ that the summer months were the most popular ones. (As I guess they are in many areas).
After a few weeks it ‘realised’ (or more likely its algorithms became more sophisticated) and it started showing prices even higher than I’d ordinarily set and yet that didn’t prevent bookings. So yes, it’s made more money for me 
I think it’s pretty unrealistic to expect any pricing service to know which events are happening everywhere in the world. For example, twice a year we have a local art fair that takes place a fifteen minute walk from our rental. Vendors and buyers come from all over the country and the only hotel that is within walking distance books up very quickly. We raise our prices (manually) for that. Also I keep an eye on the local convention centre’s calendar and up our prices when there are large conventions. These are two examples that pricing services just couldn’t do.
So I’m very happy with the combination of SP and my own manual updating.
Abnb has no idea about local events and their smart pricing is a joke. I am in Nashville and hotel prices skyrocket during event…football, CMA, etc
I check prices at my nearby Marriot and adjust accordingly.
If these pricing programs are working for you guys, I think I will give them a try for the slow periods in winter.
Smart Pricing still sets the price too low for me, which is why I don’t use it. I’ve had it on for quite a while, but with a higher minimum.
pricelabs.co seem good, but rather expensive.
So I think it’s going to be regular manual adjustments for me, unless I can find a cheaper automatic one. If there is something out there that charges 1-3% rather then a fixed monthly amount, that would be more appealing.