Talk to me about Smart Pricing in a Football town

[Carole530]

I turned on Smart Pricing, as a new AirBNB host, and thought it would accommodate the pricing in my SEC football town for my AirBNB rental.  So now our first home game is this coming weekend, I hear stories of others renting their property, albeit a bit bigger for thousands per night and I have an incoming group of 6 into my fully brand new furnishings super nice, walking distance to the game condo for $149 a night.  I obviously did something wrong.  Happy for the guests for getting a deal but not so happy about my misunderstanding of the pricing.  I get it - they booked early before Smart Pricing was smart enough to know this was a football weekend - maybe in this case, I should just turn that thing off and price manually?  Thoughts, please?  I am totally new to this host thing, so need your wisdom. 

[Solveig0]

Sorry about your experience.  We have a similar thing every summer, and ours also get booked up before smart pricing gets smart.  You live and you learn and you learn the limits of smart pricing - I guess...  I wouldn't say you didn't something wrong, hopefully you'll get some good reviews from it that will allow you to get more bookings where you can set the price higher, for example through rule sets.

I would look at rule sets and maybe use smart pricing for the non-football weekends, and create rule sets that you can apply to all football weekends, that way you can define price, check in & out days etc etc... 

[Donald28]

Oh yes definitely turn off smart pricing AND instant book if you are using them. Watch what nearby, similar homes are being offer at and price yours according to the actual market. Smart pricing is really dumb. 

And honestly, you might think about cancelling the reservation, taking the hit and relisting the days for the correct amount. Especially, if you're talking about losing out on $500 or more! You could call airbnb, explain smart pricing screwed you out of hundreds of dollars and ask what can be done.