Like, come on! What new tools? I have always used the website because it is so much better than the app. The app has only ever shown a portion of what is available for you to use as a host. Having said that, the “new pricing tools” are a joke. So the comparisons to the other properties aren’t comparisons at all. They are showing me monthly rentals, three-bedroom houses, etc. I am a single room in a home and not monthly, so NO comparison there. And even worse, it forces you to do the work yourself. At least with the old price-tips, you could in one go set a string of dates to Airbnb’s suggested rates and then raise or lower the amount to what you wanted to in comparison to that. It would have been nice if they kept that and added a function to raise or lower a string of dates by percentages, or dollars. Now, the only way we can really have our pricing managed is in being forced to use Smart Pricing, or guesstimating the price we want to charge, because Airbnb has now failed miserably in showing us our true competition. Doh!
Consider PriceLabs to price your listing. You can do a free trial for one month and then it’s $20/month. At least it helps you develop appropriate pricing, OR you can. do that yourself, as many Hosts do here, by comparing comparable properties, including hotels.
The OP’s listing, a room in her home, is not comparable to hotels. It is only comparable to other private room homeshares which sleep the same number of guests.
colour me shocked to hear this new tool is a complete dud.
The “similar listings”, which have always shown at the bottom of my listing page, have never been similar, unless you consider places listed for more than one guest (which is all I host), places that cost twice what I charge, places in the noisiest part of town (mine is in a quiet countryside area), places with shared bathrooms (mine is private), places with no cooking facilities (guests have full use of my kitchen) to be “similar”. Their faulty comparisons are nothing new.
yep, and why people were gushing with excitement is a mystery, but nothing new as well. They are lucky I’m not allowed on the CC cos i’d be pointing out these facts… They keep telling us to be unique (how do the OMG listings have “similars”??) but then somehow think they can compare us to listings that are nothing like what I offer. bonkers, as usual. I can only assume they staff their company with sycophants and they ignore all the good suggestions from actual hosts (and ban the outspoken ones from speaking!)
Wanted to warn everyone about a new “bug” in Airbnb’s recent pricing / calendar features.
I use Pricelabs to manage my pricing, and this new calendar release puts your availability list into “read only mode”, per Airbnb: when you use an external system to manage your pricing, you can no longer do manual over-rides on held dates, change pricing, etc.
I just had a situation yesterday where I had a guest ask for a special offer - but later declined, then I had someone else a short while later ask to check in (I don’t know instant bookings same day for reasons). But even though the previous special request was rejected, Airbnb still held a block on the dates. Even phoning Airbnb support was useless, kept prattling on about how I need to check with my pricing system (even though my pricing system showed the correct situation).
After an hour on hold, they finally admitted the new features had their own bug team and I should expect a fix within 72 hours.
Of course I lost my booking, would have earned over $1k too. All because Airbnb locked their own customer support agents out from releasing holds. Almost feels like retaliation for using an external PMS/Pricing engine (or just poor testing)
I appreciate your response HostAirbnbVRBO, but I really feel that this is something Airbnb should be providing us for free. I’d not like they don’t have the tech. I personally liked to go in every couple of days to change my pricing, but now I have no reference points to do that. Airbnb offers us tools, when in reality they are making things worse for us. Airbnb Plus, anyone???