Smart Pricing

[John6641]

Hi All, I am new to Airbnb, but not new to holiday letting. Smart Pricing. I see from other chats it is a contentious subject. I'd like to use it if it works. I turned it on. I set a lower limit of £70 and an upper limit of £250. These were the figures that the bot initially suggested (give or take a few pounds), based on my original pricing target. So, I went with it. I finished the rest of the listing over the next day. I then looked through the listing preview, and I could see the fluctuation between the upper and lower limits, all good I thought. However, when I looked further out, to May, June, July and August, all days were set to the lower limit pricing. Not only is that prime holiday season, but the public holidays before and after were also ignored. Due to other engagements, I left it there for the night.

Today I returned, to see if I could fix it. I went into the area where you set pricing, and cutting a long story short, the suggested pricing has dramatically gone down to something like £45 (low) and £150 (high) respectively!! without any intervention from myself and with the same problem mentioned previously, only now my high season rates are now £45 per night!! Should I just give up on Smart Pricing or am I doing something wrong.

[Bob297]

Yes, you should give up smart pricing. Research your competitors and set your pricing. It's a lot of work. I would give it up quickly, or you run the risk that you will have a lot of reservations at too low a price
@John6641 

[Sudsrung0]

@John6641 

My husband has been playing around with it in the last few days, we never used it for years and we thought take a look it might have improved, no it hasn't,I dont know where they are getting their data from it's way of the mark for us here in Phuket we are now entering high season here and the demand is high but they say otherwise I would rather trust my local knowledge of the STR market,

My husband has a local FB group for villa and condo rentals we can see what is happening.

[Emiel1]

@John6641 

Smart pricing will not set prices beyond the limits you have set.

Suggested prices are just (indeed) "suggestions" by Airbnb, useally better be ignored.

Smart Pricing works best when using a small bandwith between lower and upper level.

The lower level should be your standard price (which you would have set without Smart Pricing)

I use it already for years. You always have the option to manually set prices for a specific time period.

[Mike-And-Jane0]

@John6641 until Airbnb creates a ruleset that allows me to set the min and max price seasonally and for certain event weekends I wont use it. It just isn't smart enough to cope with the subtlety of pricing across the world.