Competition Analysis

It’s a sporadic thing for me, but I’m also motivated to do it when bookings are slow.

Look at this excellent post by @JJD and read the topic under which it’s posted: “What Pricing Tools Have You Found Helpful?” Her approach is systematic and she does it over coffee!

I use PriceLabs for pricing; their pricing is higher than what we had been doing on our own. I do an intuitive check from time to time to check for reasonableness by looking at prices of my comparative set within Price Labs. BTW, when I look at their prices I also look at how busy they are (of course, I can’t know if blocked dates are bookings but I think I can make reasonable inferences.

Responding to @Rolf’s comment:

True. When I look at a listing that I’ve put in a group as competitive with ours I look at everything, meaning not just the list of amenities but how they describe the listing, the pictures, the captions, the reviews. I compare that to ours.

I mentioned recently here that I was looking at a listing physically close to ours that I had kind of dismissed initially. But when I read the captions that gave me a sense of the Host and a different perspective on the place it suddenly looked far more appealing to me [don’t know how many others would view it the same way] and I kind of filed that ‘Aha’ away when I next review our pictures’ captions and listing language to impart more of the Host’s personality. Sometimes charm can feel more important than ‘hard’ information, or at least put it in a new light.