Last winter I spent a lot of off-season time drilling down into my nightly prices, seeing what had worked best over four years of hosting. I came up with a “sweet spot” for each of the three listings and set that number as the minimum with Smart Pricing.
My prices were already higher than most of my competitors. But here’s the long story short:
*by May, my booked income for 2019 was 100% of my booked income for 2018
*overall income for the year so far has now increased 25%
*number of nights booked has gone up 13%
*average nightly price across three listings has gone up 10%
*at this point last year, I had 34 bookings; this year so far, I have 68 bookings.
Before using Smart Pricing, I looked into Beyond Pricing. (Wheelhouse is not available in my area.) Their demo showed that, on average, they would be charging less than I was already charging. So I decided to try Smart Pricing, which many hosts hate. They hate it because it “tells them” to set a lower minimum price than they want to charge. But if you SET YOUR MINIMUM AT WHAT YOU WOULD NORMALLY CHARGE, rates will go up dynamically.
And by adding the Smart Pricing tool to Instant Book, I found my listings rose dramatically in the rankings. I signed on with Rank Breeze and found that they were almost always on the first page.
Other discoveries:
*after a few months, I found that even when I used Airbnb’s suggested minimum, Smart Pricing set most nights at my “sweet spot” rate – showing me that the algo drew the same conclusion I had drawn. However, I never left it at the minimum rate for more than a few minutes! 🙂
*Smart Pricing’s suggested maximum changes often, and I always use their suggestion for the maximum, even though my prices have never hit the maximum.
*in an effort to keep the listings fresh and drive them up the rankings, many of us make changes regularly. Changing or adding photos doesn’t update the listing, but changing ONE LETTER of the listing description does.
*when your prices are up, you might get a suggestion to send out a special discount offer for a period of days. In the off season, I always did that, because Airbnb sends an email with the offer out to people searching those dates. It mattered less to me that I got bookings than that I got more eyes and clicks. And more eyes and clicks raises you in the rankings.
It seems like your listing will get more favorable treatment the more Airbnb tools you use. I know there are a lot of Smart Pricing haters out there, but why not give it a try, making sure you always use your own minimum, and see what happens?
