Discounts & Pricing & Rule-Sets OH MY!

[David-and-Debbie0]

Just trying to get the AirBnB system to price the way I want, and to display discounts to potential guests properly, and need some help.

The basics: Lake Michigan Beach town with heavy tourist season June, July & August and waning interest the rest of the year.

What I would like: To use Automatic pricing to price the home year-round, with an universal Weekend percentage increase. Then to use a Rule-Set to increase pricing during tourist season by "x%" - OR - To price the property for tourist season and then offer a discount of "x%" the rest of the year. Then there are a few times I'll have to price manually (local festivals, etc.) This all seems like it should be extremely straight-forward.

The problem(s):

a)  The primary issue seems to be that when I look at my property as a potential guest, it does not show discounted prices in the listing set by my Rule-Sets. In other words, if my minimum is $100, and I create rules-sets that offer 50% off October-April, and a 25% discount May and September, my listing still shows a "from" price of $100. I also see no indication that there is a discount on the property part of the year. In other words, I see nothing that would make a potential guest say "hey, look at this nice discount during November on this cottage!" In this example, even if people could rent for $50 a night during December, my listing would still say "$100 per night." Furthermore, even when selecting the property and moving to the next step, the rule-sets discount seems to be broken (see problem "d" below).

b) I've also looked at my calendar, and nowhere does auto-pricing actually have my property listed at my actual minimum-nightly I have set with auto-pricing. I guess I consider that a bit "bait and switch". Should I just go and set a couple of months manually so I don't feel skeevy?

c) Weekend pricing still doesn't work with auto-pricing, so I've been pricing weekends during tourist season manually (which means those weekends no-longer auto-price, unfortunately). How do you handle this? Would it be easier for me to just forgoe auto-pricing altogether?

d) As far as I can tell, the Rule-set discounts don't even work. I have set a couple weeks aside with a steep discount just for testing purposes, and if I go in and look at those nights they show my normal pricing. If I try to book for 7 days my weekly discount does show up, but "test discount" rules-set never actually seems to work. At all.

e) Actually, in more playing around with it, it appears to me as if the Rule-Set feature is completely broken. Nothing I do with it actually appears to function: Prices on the calendar do not change, prices on the listing do not change. Anyone else having this problem?

Any suggestions? It really doesn't seem like it should be all that difficult to achieve my desired goal, but every option I try seems to lead to a dead-end or a broken feature.

[David-and-Debbie0]

Well, I was quite determined to tackle this issue, so I went in to one of my properties and tried an entire series of edits to try and figure out where the problems was:

What it comes down to is this: You should basically treat all the pricing tools as mutually exclusive. (For example, the new Rules-Set feature doesn't work at all if you have Smart-Pricing turned on, not even if you manually turn Smart-Pricing off for a range of dates. There is no indication anywhere on the AirBnB site when implementing these features that this is the case.)

You really have about 3 tools:

1) Smart Pricing - in which case the ONLY other thing you can do is manually edit pricing for certain days by turning Smart Pricing off and setting the price manually (note, this does not enable features that do not work with Smart-Pricing turned ON, in order to get those functions to work you must disable Smart-Pricing completely for a property).

2) A base price with custom Weekend price (with Smart Pricing turned OFF for the property, completely, not just for selected days). This mean a LOT of manual edits if your prices change through the year and/or for holidays and other events. You can combine this with the new Rules-Set feature, which would be extremely useful if they worked together properly, but they do don't. Thus, if you add a Rules-Set feature, (such as "Tourist Season +75% base pricing") that will supersede  your custom weekend pricing instead of supmenting it. This makes Rules-Sets largely useless if your weekend pricing is different from your weekday pricing.

3) Use only the new Rules-Set feature, and use that for all your pricing modifications beyond your base price. This might actually work best for some of us, but it still means a lot of manual work as you might need many sets. For example, in our area there is the Primary Tourist Season (June, July, August), a Pre-and-Post Tourist season (May, September, October) and then Off-Season (very little interest regardless of price). Manually managing that with Rules-Sets (because applying a Rules-Set disable custom weekend pricing) would require a minimum of 5 Rules-Sets if you start with a Base Off-Season price that you want to have for Weekdays (let's say $100 to make things easy): Off-Season weekends (+25% = $125); Pre&Post Tourist Season Weekdays (+50% = $150); Pre&Post Tourist Season Weekends (+75% = $175); Tourist Season Weekdays (+75% = $175) and Tourist Season Weekends (+100% = $200). That means selecting and applying these Rules-Sets manually throughout the calendar. A real pain and probably not a viable solution, although it is very flexible (it would allow you to change your base-price and then see that reflected across your calendary automagically).

IMHO the AirBnB website should clearly state exactly which of these features do not work together while you are implementing them, but hopefully this will help some others who are trying to implement a bit more control over their pricing and assuming that these mutually-exclusive tools work together.

[Allison2]

Rule sets are entirely broken.

I don't use smart pricing or any of the other auto-features. I tried using a rule set to require a 3-day minimum booking over Memorial Day weekend. I also set a requirement for the weekdays leading into the weekend so they'd need to check out Friday or stay through the weekend. (No groups that only take one day of the popular weekend!)

Someone was still able to book a Thursday to Saturday stay in violation of my calendar rules. I spoke with CS and they couldn't find anything wrong with how I set it up. Their solution was to set my ENTIRE default calendar to prevent check-outs on Saturday and Sunday. (Idiots. That is NOT a fix!)

[Sara1364]

Hi! Thanks for posting this information...I'm a new host and was trying (in vain) to use Rule Sets to increase pricing for football games and holidays and had NO idea why that wasn't working...I had Smart Pricing turned on. I agree, AirBnB would make life a little easier for us if they shared that these are mutually exclusive features and you can't use both at the same time. The website sure makes it SEEM like you are using both at the same time. I'm glad I found your post 🙂

[Ann72]

Thank you @David-and-Debbie0 I just turned rule sets on for holiday weekends and ran a test booking - nothing, nada, zilch.  I see now why they don't work.  

In addition I had set up a discount for 2-night stays, but it was applied to a 3-night stay.  The chosen discount doesn't say "2 OR MORE nights," it says "2 nights."  

This is just insane.  Back to manually changing the prices for holiday weekends, because Smart Pricing doesn't seem to recognize Memorial Day, the 4th of July, or Labor Day.  Grrrrr.

[David-and-Debbie0]

Glad this helped a few people!

As far as I can tell things haven't changed yet. I guess that we just have to live with it for now. I'm considering trying to micro-managing at least one of our two properties using the Rules-sets next tourist season, but I can't afford the time (or messing something up) during tourist-season, so I'll have to wait until probably October to really dig into that and see if the Rules-sets really work as they should.