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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. Itās 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 Iām concerned, forget Instant Book as well. Weāve seen lots of problems with it, but some folks like itā¦
Iāve noticed Homeaway (which took over Stayz in Australia) is much better actually showing you ācomparable propertiesā and their prices in your area so you can decide if the really are comparable.
I always ignore their smart pricing. When I first posted my listing it wanted me to offer it for $55 a night. Itās a whole house rental that sleeps eight. I rented it for $200 a night. I did my own research and priced it accordingly.
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.
After my very short experience, getting āsmart 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 donāt see how anyone would trust the āsmart pricingā system.
In fact itās smart for one person - the website - because they get more commissions if hosts rent at a loss.
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.
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 abnb⦠The system annoyed us so much we didnāt book. I canāt imagine doing that to guests, especially when our condo rents at a high price in the summer anyways.
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.
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 doesnāt sit well with me to raise the price because of a bit of extra traffic.
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.