Price per night disappears when a guest books

[Enzo104]

I set a price per night for my listing for each day on my calendar. Now, when the guests book, that price disappears. However, I would like to see what price I charged them on which day. How can I see that?

[Emiel1]

@Enzo104 

You can only see the average price per night in the booking confirmation.

[Ben551]

Hi @Enzo104 - if I understand you correctly, you are looking at the calendar. When a guest books, those blank days with numbers are replaced by a booking, yes?

I’ll try to explain step by step how to see the daily price:

1. Head to your booking calendar
2. Click on a booking to open the Reservation Details page
3. Scroll down until you see Total Payout
4. Click the $$ amount on the right of Total Payout
5. This will open the “Payout Breakdown” screen (example below)

[Susan151]

@Enzo104 

@Ben551 This is not actually an accurate reply. If night 1 is set to $90 per night, and night 2 is set to $110. per night, the screen that you have screen shot will say $100x 2 nights. That isn't what @Enzo104 wants. He wants to see the original price as set.

To retain how much you actually were paid for each night, you will need to do a bunch of work. You would need a spreadsheet, database or calendar app, then enter your prices and then enter any modifications you might make. For me, this isn't cost effective. I run reports to get average price over various two week periods.

[Ben551]

That’s true @Susan151  it does average out the price for the booking.

i can still see every single individual days price before and after pricing, but Wheelhouse does that for me automatically. I don’t know how to get that info from Airbnb, as you say without all manner of spreadsheets.

[Ann72]

@Enzo104 This drives me crazy, too, so I've started screenshotting each month.

@Susan151, can you tell me more about the reports you run so I can geek out?

[Susan151]

@Ann72 . In my real life, I write databases. I particularly enjoy pushing and pulling data. I wrote a little tool that pulls in my reservation confirmation emails which are then compared and merged with a table that holds the .csv data from AirBNB. A big loop then scoops the datasets into another table where I have number of nights, number of guests, confirmation number, guest name, average price per night– all the available data.

Then I can run summary reports by any period. I can investigate how many nghts were booked, average price, average number of guests, etc. This information then informs the price that I set on my listing. I find this particularly useful during the "slow" seasons. "High" season is easy.

[Ann72]

@Susan151, this is fantastic!  I think you could sell your system to Airbnb hosts.  Seriously, there are so many off-platform widgets out there.  This one would help assuage my annual February panic - will I get bookings for the summer???  I went and got the CSV data from all the reservations I had ever received, imported it to Excel, removed some nonessential info, and sorted it by date booked.  Turns out I've never had more than three summer bookings in February, but this year I got 8.  This would be comforting if not for the fact that I immediately panicked about never getting another booking lol.

So you see, I would be your first customer.

[Susan151]

@Ann72 . I keep posting this idea around hoping that someone will build a similar tool for commercial purposes. I don't have the energy right now to de-Susan-fy this tool or to maintain, improve, etc.

Your response triggered me to remember one of the most important data points: date booked, and now, date canceled. [And yes, when someone cancels less than 2 weeks before arrival, I have had to reduce my rate to rebook. The cancelation policies are a true cash-suck.]

[Ann72]

@Susan151, I understand why you're not going to build it.  I hope someone pays attention, though, because the more you host, the more you want to drill down and understand as much as possible about patterns.

Have you pulled date booked to your reports before or are you saying you haven't done that yet?  It's none of my business but I'm just curious.  I think it's more important to me than to someone who has a year-round listing, because my listing is in Maine and there's very little off-season activity.  So in January and February I'm always wondering when the high season bookings will start flowing in.

Are you saying that if you pull in date cancelled, you'll be able to see some sort of pattern and that that will affect your pricing decisions?  That would be kind of interesting.

[Susan151]

@Ann72 Date booked is critical and why I pull in those emails. The emails give me a time stamp for the moment that they booked. I added the cancel date about 9 months ago as I got more and more of them. This is also grabbed from the email time stamp.

One of the key fields is the confirmation code, plus the booked time_stamp. [Warning: the confirmation code is NOT unique.] This way when you get a second email about a reservation, it doesn't get added but instead the original record gets a "child."

I suspect most hosts find counting the number of nights booked in a month and the net income to be enough. Obviously, the two of us are different [in a good way.]

[Ann72]

@Susan151 :):):)

I don't have your skills, but I have your level of curiosity!  🙂

[Enzo104]

Thank you so much for the replies, guys. I'll start taking screenshots, I guess or work with the average price.