"Smart Pricing" does not account for cleaning fee

#1

“Smart Pricing” is recommending some pretty high prices for my units for August and September. Normally these are the least profitable months for me in Florida. So I decided to investigate a bit. I don’t want to leave money on the table, but I also don’t want to set prices too high and have no bookings.

So, in the true spirit of a high school science experiment, I did the following:

  1. left the cleaning fee at its standard setting of $50 for all my units
  2. turned on “Smart Pricing” for all of my units.
  3. took a screenshot of recommended prices for Sept 1-20
  4. reduced the cleaning fee to $0 on one unit, increased it to $300 on another
  5. turned off “Smart Pricing” on those two units, loaded the multi-calendar, verified that manually set prices were applied
  6. turned “Smart Pricing” back on for those units
  7. compared the new recommended prices to the screenshot

And the observations and are:

  1. I found a couple of minor differences of $1 plus/minus on a couple of dates, so I conclude that Airbnb did recalculate the prices.
  2. I conclude that the cleaning fee isn’t taken into consideration. Changing it from $50 to $0 or $300 should have caused large changes in the recommended prices, and it didn’t.
#2

A cleaning fee, in effect, discounts a longer stay. The smart price doesn’t know in advance how many days someone will book.

1 Like
#3

Wait… what? If someone stay longer the cleaning fee is reduced with Smart Pricing?

#4

No…

#5

Smart pricing doesn’t know anything about how long a guest plans to stay so how could it adjust? I think he means AirBnB smart pricing is treating it as if the cleaning fee is being charged every night as it only looks at the “nightly rate + cleaning fee” when doing the comparison with other options.

#6

I appreciate your scientific approach.

Do you have a minimum stay > 1 night? I wonder if your min stay was 2 nights rather than 1 it would take cleaningfee/#MinNights instead?