Hello HAB!
Here in Palm Beach County, Florida, we’re looking forward to working more closely with y’all. Our piece of Florida has a wide range of hosting experiences, from beachside, and the Intracoastal Waterway, to horse country in the cities that rim the Everglades. I met quite a few of my fellow hosts while we were trying to reconnect our businesses to Airbnb when the county, and city, weren’t being very clear, or helpful, about licensure. Since then, we talk from time-to-time. I know that one topic that comes up frequently is the disparity in “smart” pricing between Airbnb and other services affiliated with travel booking sites tied into hotels, and B&Bs. Their algorithms are very different, as they draw on data for hotel and B&B occupancies from the other partner services.
It seems like one very mission-critical area of host support that could use a bit more explanation, and maybe a tweak, or two.
One thing that came up repeatedly in our discussion was the “apples-to-apples” issue. Jamil has a really cool trio of little homes on his property in the Loxahatchee woods. Penny runs a very boutique, elegant standalone guest house on Palm Beach Island. Leslie has an apartment in an upcoming part of Lake Worth. Dave rents out a room in Greenacres. They’re all very different experiences. Yet “Smart” pricing really makes no distinctions for that, because it lacks the metric data to do so.
There really aren’t a lot of filters to ask hosts about what makes their places special, or unique, other than pretty basic amenities. Some of them, like full kitchens, are actually banned for vacation rentals by some of the cities in our county. So some of those metrics couldn’t really be used for pricing, because the hosts can’t do much about them.
A couple of people suggested that the ability to be able to establish what pricing tier that you would like to participate in would be a great revision to Smart pricing. I suggested that some sort of pricing guidance, like setting to a lower tier, as a new host, until you build up reviews, might be in order.
Gus agreed, and also suggested that, perhaps, Airbnb also give some guidance to help hosts pick pricing based on what they provide, in intangibles that the host knows, in picking the right pricing tier. If you have a Star Wars themed yurt, a lagoonside cabin, or a room that goes toe-to-toe with the nearby Four Seasons, with all kinds of amenities, those might skew towards data that shows they belong in an upper tier. Providing equally essential, value-oriented places for people traveling that do the basics well, but have few bells and whistles, like Dave’s spare bedroom might be suggested for another tier. In between, locations like a more spartan platform tent on a farm near a beautiful spring, might be in a more experiential, tier in the middle.
One other suggestion, by Amy, was for Airbnb to partner with someone who can provide better data on room availability in the hotel and/or B&B/Inn marketspace. When that inventory dries up, during events, and peak times, in our tourist-dominant area, rates for all available host properties should move upward. When we have a glut of inventory, as there was in March of last year, prices should drop, and we should be notified that we need those adjustments, and not just have Smart Pricing do them automatically.
Currently, the only way for an Airbnb host to do that is to turn off Smart Pricing, and hire a company that aids in providing that data.
Allowing the hosts to have some input into how they envision their own marketing, and the value of intangibles that it would be difficult to quantify on Airbnb, would make Smart Pricing more relevant. Right now, most VR advice pages suggest to ignore Smart Pricing. Airbnb gets a lot of good information. Surely it can be put to great use!
Suksma,
Brian Ross
Brian Ross
