I am interested in anyone’s experience with the Smart Pricing feature in Airbnb. Will I make more or get more bookings if I utilize this tool?
Your title asks about more money, but the question itself speaks of more bookings?
The two things are not necessarily the same 
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I said will I make more or get more bookings.
Will you get more booking? Probably!
Will you make more money? Possibly, or possibly make a lot less!
You will get more bookings, but chances are you will make less money unless you diligently proof those numbers knowing your local market well.
I’ve been using Beyond.com for “Smart Pricing” for almost 2 years, since long before Airbnb offered “Price Tips.” I’d estimate that my revenue is up about 30-40% since I started using Beyond. (40% in year 1, 30% in year 2. I believe that discrepancy may be due to more and more users adding smart pricing, so there’s more competition at all levels. For example, during slow times, many more listings drop their prices now, so to get booked, my rates need to drop more than they needed to before there were others adjusting their rates, too.)
When I compare Beyond’s recommended rates to Airbnb’s price tips, Airbnb often recommends about 20-30% lower rates. I am booked about 80% of the time, roughly 300 nights per year, and I’m pretty happy with that occupancy rate. (We share a room in our home, so an occasional night with no guests is just fine.)
So I guess that’s a long answer to the original question. The short answer would be: I don’t know about Airbnb’s price tips, but I’m pretty sure you’d make more money and book more nights using Beyond’s smart pricing.
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I use beyond pricing. Even though they take 1% in fees, their prices are higher than Air’s “smart pricing” and they don’t drop my prices as low in the week coming, and they actually follow my minimum pricing. Even though I think it makes sense to drop prices a bit if there’s still an opening a day or two before, if there’s nothing else available I’ll get booked at $40 (what "smart pricing has gone to) or my $60 minimum on Beyond. Even though I have some months where I only get 85% booked, I’m still making 30% more than when I was 98% booked using “smart pricing”. Air’s goal is to get you 100% booked, Beyond’s goal is to make you the most money.
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I am using pricelabs and happy with them. It’s cost me around 0,2-0,3% of my gross income (20 dollars per month) and I am not activating for every months,
I can’t really tell if there’s a difference in what I’m making with smart pricing on. I’m getting roughly the same number of bookings now as I did at this time last year without smart pricing.
I do have my low price for SP set at just $2 under what my fixed price was. Weekends I notice it sometimes goes up $5 or $8 for my bed in the living room. I do have, IB turned on also, and I’m getting 50% or so of that type of reservation.
I should turn off SP and IB so I can get a comparison.
From what we hear from hosts smart pricing does not show some extra efficiency. I would recommend trying some specialized tools like Beyond Pricing or PriceLab. Do some research and select a proper software for you. There is much more you can do to get most of your pricing. Check out this new article on our blog.
Hosts have widely differing opinions about smart pricing. Search this forum and you’ll find plenty of topics.
I think that yes, you’ll make more money and yes, you’ll get more bookings. For me at least, smart pricing charges more that I would dream of doing at certain times.
You have to be smart as well though and manually adjust the calendar for local special events and so on. But I guess that all hosts do that anyway.
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