Need Smarter Pricing Math

[Eric455]

We have listings in a snowbird neighborhood. Guests book a whole calendar month, arriving on the 1st and departing on the last day of the month. Thus, the number of nights they stay is one less than the number of actual nights in the month. Moreover, the minimum stay in our neighborhood is "one month" which could be 27, 28, 29, or 30 nights depending on the month.

Because guests book calendar months, any reservation that extends into a high-season month prevents anyone else from booking in that month. Extending one day into March is the same as taking the whole month.

Your pricing math NEVER gets it right, so it always creates an awkward conversation and of course would make it impossible to do instant booking. Snowbirds don't want to do instant booking, anyway; they are the conversation generation. Because they're staying so long they have a lot of questions and need to converse with us. It takes time and they book a year in advance.

Here is how it has to work for us:

1. We need to specify the minimum length of stay for each month of the season. 

2. For certain months (i.e. high season) any reservation that extends into the month must pay the full month.

If you can't do that, nobody will book with us using Airbnb. They'll find us on the MLS or somewhere else.

[Fred13]

Perhaps you should consider NOT using 'Smart' Pricing, since it is a computer program, which could never succesfully account for the infinite every-day combinatioins of especific host realities all over the world.

[Eric455]

Hi Fred,

Thanks for joining the discussion. I don't use Airbnb's smart pricing; this is about the basic pricing math. To be fair, no booking platform gets it right. 

I think the dynamic at work here is the length of stay for Snowbirds. It's a decision people make up to a year in advance, they have a lot of questions and Airbnb's full-automation and aggressive timing are just not a good match.

Eric

PS Placencia is beautiful—we stayed there once. Friends run a children's home in PG.

[Christine615]

If I understand this, the problem is not "smart pricing" but the discount available if you book a month. But the algorithm considers a book that straddles from one month to the next to be two months of booking. 

One option is to offer the discount in your description and say it will be applied at booking, then you can go in and "change" the amount they were offered by Airbnb (reduce the amount), or send them a special offer that includes the discount.

But make sure you tell them you will manually discount the price once the booking is confirmed.

I think that should work.  I did it for another guest. We had a problem with something in the apartment but the contractor couldn't fix it until the next week - the guest didn't care but we reduced their rate anyway by using the special offer feature - which they accepted and it changed what they were charged.