I go to LOWER my price on 2 nearly identical bedrooms in my house. Here is what happens. My higher original prices are GREEN. I LOWER them 20% and now they are RED!!! The smart prices between the two vary greatly and they are identical! Smart pricing suggests I rent a 3bedroom home for $59 including fees and a bedroom in the SAME HOUSE for $79. Just ridiculous stuff. St Patrick’s is our best weekend,we get DOUBLE the money and are booked out a year in advance. So smart pricing suggested I rent FOR HALF the normal price.
Best suggestion : NEVER BE SO STUPID AS TO USE SMART PRICING.
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Almost all has some opinions on air bnb smart pricing
I whole hearted agree with the title of this post! I do however think that it is good for new hosts to use smart pricing, for a bit of time. When I first started hosing, it allowed for lots of booking so I was able to “Wow” guests and receive reviews quickly.
True. I use it and love it. It charges higher prices than I would and I can still change prices manually when there are special events etc.
Just got even more evidence of how ridiculous “smart” pricing is. I have a 3 bedrooom house that I sometimes rent as a 2 bedroom during slow times (by locking one bedroom door). This way I can offer a discount to folks who only need 2 bedroom but love my house otherwise. And it saves on cleaning time, so the $10 discount just takes that into account.
So, surprise, surprise : today the “smart” pricing is telling me my THREE bedroom listing should charge Thirty percent LESS than the SAME house with just 2 bedrooms to use!!! DUMB pricing!!
So realize you are competing against YOURSELF. All pricing is based on your previous price. So if you lower prices due to a slow time in your area, like after a hurrucane, then the smart pricing will think your house is always “worth less” and from then on - it will want to go back to those discounted rates.
It is in NO WAY comparing the “worth” of your house’s appeal. It is a scheme to lower your price so Airbnb can market itself as a " bargain".
Using the ridiculous low pricing hurts EVERYONE.
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I am using an other dynamic price platform and it’s working very good.
For our place 3 bedroom, we have a price for 2 persons and each extra person is X SEK. It’s working very weel and I don’t need to close doors as I am only making correct number of beds corresponding to the booking.
I honestly don’t get this. It has NEVER set a price lower than the minimum I specified and often has prices higher than I would set.
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I don´t understand why people use SMART PRICING or in any other tool from a third-party company to set their prices.
You and no one better than you will know how to price your listings.In fac,t I strongly believe this is a must if you really want to monetize your listing and it isn´t a very hard job to do in relation to the other tasks that are involved managing a BnB.
If you get too many bookings (more than expected) then you are cheap, raise your price, If you get no bookings you are expensive, drop you price. Easy task. The first year will be tricky, the second one will be more easy and the third one you will master when are you peaks for low/high season to price better than any other tool in the market. You will learn that going below certain number. gets bargain hunters that will complicate your life. You will learn that in certain moments it will be better to wait longer until opening an offer for those dates that are hard to fill.
You need to know your market hence you need to test your price yourself. Don´t let other company take you the oportunity to get the knownledge you need to maximize your earnings.
And I don’t understand the complaints against smart pricing. You set your personal minimum and maximum. I’ve actually got my minimum slightly higher on smart pricing than my base price. I control the parameters completely. How then is it stupid, and why shouldn’t I use it to automate some (note I said some!) of the job of pricing up nightly stays?
Smart pricing works for managing normal days in your calendar; you still need to manually manage any special days e.g. New Year’s Eve but smart pricing does a lot of the heavy lifting.
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I didn’t notice that when I use their smart pricing tool my prices were lower than what I charged. I just keep my price the same $79 a night .
The smart prices for my million dollar home are often a joke. Like $200 a night and I have $8,000 a month mortgage. The $250,000 home I have will often say it should charge double what smart states for $1,000,000 one. So just bizarre. I usually charge TWICE what smart suggests and book at close to 100 percent. If I had followed Smart, I would be $100,000 poorer this year.
Follow it if you like, but I am glad I don’t…
???
Am I speaking a foreign language? You type in what your minimum is on smart pricing. If you want it to be 1.000,000 a night so be it? Have you even looked at it’s functionality?
Oh thank goodness someone speaks the same language as me! I’ve banged on about this is so many topics here.
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@Zandra @jaquo I have not played with SP in awhile, but when I first tried it out (and ultimately switched to Beyond Pricing) it was indeed listing my property lower than the min price I inputted. Im not sure if it was a glitch that has been solved or not.
I think SP works great in some areas but fails miserably in others. My theory is bc SP goes off what other hosts are doing not necessarily what the market is demanding. For example in a place like SF we have tons of conferences, and many hosts dont know/care so SP predicts low pricing as where Beyond Pricing predicts much higher prices. When I was first sorting out dynamic pricing I enetered the same min/max parameters into SP, Beyond Pricing, and Everbooked, to compare the their outputs. SP was significantly lower overthe same time period than the 3rd party companies.
As always your experience may vary, this is just my experience. 
I have exactly the same observation with SP.
I can put a minimum on SP but it will only work for low season as other part of the year I can and want much more rates.
I’d take another look @azreala as you control the maximum and minimum not Airbnb.
@sylvainbg smart pricing will always need some help it’s not a perfect system. It automates some of the pricing and like I stated earlier, does some of the heavy lifting for you.
I don’t open my calendar further than 3 months in advance and it’s fine for me. However I don’t imagine it’s difficult to go into your peak season and turn off smart pricing for those dates if you want a much higher price.
I completely understand that ‘you’ control it, however, when I first played with SP it was suggesting prices lower than my manually inputted minimum. I was simply pointing out that while Im sure some people do not know how to ‘work’ SP, there may also be a glitch.
Its a moot point for me as I have ample data that SP will price significantly lower than Beyond Pricing (with the same min price and max price parameters) in my markets.
That’s possibly true … I haven’t tried beyond pricing so I can’t really compare.
It’s weird when the site has glitches that only affect some of us and not others. @azreala - do you mean that it was suggesting low prices or actually putting them on your calendar?
I’ve said here before (but I’ll say it again because previous comments will be buried in old topics) that when you first start with SP you have to ‘educate’ it.
For example, when I was first using it, it didn’t realise that the summer months are our off season so it was putting higher prices for the summer - just the opposite of what should be happening. But after a few weeks of me adjusting prices on a regular basis, it ‘realised’ what was going on.
Of course, it has no way of knowing about special events in every city, town or village in the world, so you have to change your prices manually for those. It’s capable of sussing out times like Christmas, Easter and Mothers Day but that’s just about all.
I’ve found that SP is a lot braver than I am as it puts prices that are higher than I’d do - and they get booked. So I love it, 
@jaquo it sctually set my price lower than the min I inputted. I feel like we get all the glitches 
What you described SP missing in respect to confrences, bank holidays, seasons, etc is exactly what the ‘pay for 3rd party dyanimc pricing’ sites have that makes them worth the money (for me). I agree that dyanimc pricing of any sorts can absolutely push your upward band on pricing, in a good way. We made 15% more than in 2015 with less booked nights, so for me thats a win. Less where and tear, more family staying, etc.
We are both speaking the same language ‘dynamic pricing’ regardelss of which service you use, is a good thing.
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