Hi folks!
Just a quick post to ask people: if you use one, what third party intelligent pricing tool do you use?
Being new hosts, the thing my wife and I are struggling to navigate is pricing. We have already missed a few tricks with future local events and national holidays, plus we noticed (too late) that AirBnb Smart Pricing was applying Northern Hemisphere winter season low-rates to our New Zealand listing in the height of our summer.. oops! Explains why we had 86% occupancy for the whole summer immediately after hitting "list" but hey... live and learn.
So, we did some research and set ourselves up with Wheelhouse yesterday. I'm really impressed with what we're seeing. It seems very advanced and shows me local events that I didn't even know about in the calendar (rugby games, local festivals, hell even art shows I didn't know about). At first we were scared about some of the price hikes that Wheelhouse put into our calendar... but when we did an independent hotal search (to see what hotel pricing was doing over those weekends)... blimey if the engine wasn't right! Hotels were surging their prices for particular weekends by 70%! Curious, we did a bit more digging and we found there was a massive festival and a Jimmy Barns concert we'd never have known about! Magic.
It took a while to carefully go through and setup (particularly the seasonal strategy), adjust and get comfortable... but I feel very in control of this. It gives me so many more levers to pull. Doing a manual search on our own listing on AirBnb, I can now see that we are in the right ball park vs. our competitors at any point across the year. Before linking to Wheelhouse we were waaaaaay off (sometimes $68 per night too low over NZ summer... I want to be lower with a new lisitng, but not that much lower... thanks Smart Pricing 😕 ).
If it works, I expect it will be a game changer, so I'm curious what tools other people use? The other big tool we saw in our research was Beyond Pricing, although that wasn't available in our city (yet). I understand they are rolling out new cities all the time though.
PS: In case people are wondering - I asked AirBnb customer support (a nice chap named Don A responded) whether it was ok to post this thread on the forum, since we'd all be discussing third party tools and things. Don A said to go for it and no issue at all (and to make a new thread instead of resurrecting a corpse).
~ Ben
I thought I would post an update on how I'm going using Wheelhouse, now that I've been using it for more than a month...
So far, it's amazing. It has helped me correct a number of pricing issues and it gives me daily price updates every...single... day. I like that if a new event comes up, even 12 months away (like a concert at our local stadium) Wheelhouse knows about it and shoots up prices, just like local hotels do. This means we avoid losing out on opportunities like this, which we couldn't possibly have time to keep an eye on ourselves.
Now Wheelhouse is giving me some good information in our dashboard, telling us how we are performing compared to other listings in our area, and giving a guide for us on occupancy targets. This is all great stuff and I can't see myself stopping using this anytime soon.
