Is Smart Pricing really all that smart?

Tonight I got an IB for well below my Smart Price minimum. The IB had other issues, and was cancelled by Air. But taking into account commissions, etc I was offered about 70 cents on the dollar.

According to the CSR, SP takes into account where you were priced last year along with where the competition was. .

Is this some kind of misunderstanding? There was a hooligan host offering an unheated attic for $15 a night for up to 10 people!

Forget Smart Pricing. Itā€™s more like Dumb Pricing. Set your prices comparable to the other listing in your immediate area (not the ones cross town or on the other side of the tracks).

As far as Iā€™m concerned, forget Instant Book as well. Weā€™ve seen lots of problems with it, but some folks like itā€¦

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Thanks Ken. I can count on you to be succinct!

instant book works great for me good to hear your thoughts about smart pricing oh i mean dumb pricing

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Iā€™ve noticed Homeaway (which took over Stayz in Australia) is much better actually showing you ā€œcomparable propertiesā€ and their prices in your area so you can decide if the really are comparable.

Thanks. However HomeAway here is whole homes, not rooms.

Our city is not that big so areas are easy to price. We lost a lot of hosts with the big cutbacks in October.

The comp ones that are still in business have higher prices now.

I

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I always ignore their smart pricing. When I first posted my listing it wanted me to offer it for $55 a night. Itā€™s a whole house rental that sleeps eight. I rented it for $200 a night. I did my own research and priced it accordingly.

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This has nothing to do with smart pricing.
Smart pricing should not go below your minimum.
If this happened, check if you have other things setup up like last minute discounts.

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After my very short experience, getting ā€œsmart pricingā€ recommendations for half of what people are ready to pay, and wanting me to propose free cleaning and laundry service while at the same time providing all my info to the local fiscal authorities, I donā€™t see how anyone would trust the ā€œsmart pricingā€ system.

In fact itā€™s smart for one person - the website - because they get more commissions if hosts rent at a loss.

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Yep 55 euros thats what they want me to offer too! I guess thatā€™s the ā€œsmart priceā€!

They also donā€™t like my charging real costs, VAT included, for cleaning and laundry.

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I have better luck with smart pricing and my minimum. We just completed one full year, so I will take a closer look at how we did with smart pricing vs. self pricing. The markets are also getting saturated. More options. Less pricing. Focus on service and special touches and hopefully that will work. I offer homemade fruit tropical smoothies one morning for all guests. They love it. For a while, I offered use of a bike.

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We do not use smart pricing thanks to my own personal experience with it as a traveler. We were looking to book a night in Edmonton, found a great place at $100, for 2 couples, but had to confirm with the other couple. When i went back to book the listing it said the price was now $140. I thought that was weird and decided to keep looking, found another place and went to book and the price went higher again. We searched several times within the same day and the prices just kept going up. We ended up just getting a hotel as the price was then less than the abnbā€¦ The system annoyed us so much we didnā€™t book. I canā€™t imagine doing that to guests, especially when our condo rents at a high price in the summer anyways.

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Oops - that could be the host changing those prices several times a day!

When I have rented nearly all my rooms, and there have been a lot of views on the last one, I will take the price up. I might even do it a second time in a day. You know, like buying gas.

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Possibly, but it was 2 or 3 properties that it happened with, and it seemed to be intuitive rather than random. Either way it put a bad taste in my mouth. We price our condo based on its value on the high side so it just doesnā€™t sit well with me to raise the price because of a bit of extra traffic.

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Your call. It works for me.

My chat with them last week said the data was a year old plus an uplift factor of about 5 percent. It still makes no sense. Comp listings are more than double.

How do you see ā€˜viewsā€™ on your Air room?