Setting the right pricing strategy for your vacation rental is essential as it can significantly impact your income. However, most hosts are too busy to monitor what is happening in their markets and manually adjust prices based on data. This is where dynamic pricing comes in.
The latest Hospitable Hosts podcast was about leveraging dynamic pricing in the Australian short-term rental market. We invited Roman Solyanyk from Beyond, the revenue management platform for short-term rental hosts and property managers. Roman is an enterprise senior account executive setting up new partnerships with hosts and property managers across Australia, New Zealand, and the EMEA region.
Press play now to discover how you can use dynamic pricing to drive more revenue and maximize the profitability of your Australia-based STR properties.
Do you prefer to read the highlights? We’ve got a summary of the key takeaways below.
How Can Beyond Dynamic Pricing Help STR Hosts?
Roman explains that the Beyond dynamic pricing tool was launched in 2013 to help STR providers “automate an otherwise laborious process and ultimately help drive more revenue by getting the right bookings at the right time, at the right price.” Since then, they’ve expanded to be an entire revenue management system that gives STR providers the keys to drive more revenue, maximize profitability, and gain intelligence about their markets.
Roman emphasizes that they focus solely on short-term rental data and analyze about 6 billion data points daily from all the major OTAs. It allows them to understand the exact supply and demand of STR properties in a particular market and neighborhood and then use these data to automate the pricing process for their clients.
“When demand is high, we’ll optimize for the best possible daily rates. We’ll adjust your prices higher. When demand is low, we’ll be more flexible with the rates to get you the optimal occupancy levels,” Roman explains. “So our market data helps property managers ensure their prices are as accurate as possible and in line with the market trends. It removes the need to continuously spend time and effort tracking these trends as they’re constantly changing,” he adds.
Beyond’s Integration with Hospitable
Roman points out that Beyond has a direct integration with Hospitable, making it quick and easy for users to connect to Beyond using an API key from the Hospitable dashboard. Beyond will push fresh rates every 24 hours directly to the Hospitable account, and Hospitable will distribute these rates to the channels a host has connected, including their direct booking website, Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com.
In addition, Hospitable users will get access to Beyond’s dashboard, which will provide them with a massive amount of data on their listings and their performance against the market’s performance. “That data-driven approach can help with decision-making regarding pricing, distribution, marketing, and relationship management,” Roman emphasizes.
Automating your prices using a dynamic pricing tool can save you several hours of precious time a week. Automating your daily repetitive tasks with Hospitable will allow you to put your entire business on autopilot and focus on providing an exceptional guest experience.
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Data Sources for Pricing Adjustments
Roman explains that Beyond uses STR occupancy data from the major OTAs to understand the supply and demand of a particular market and locality. They use historical data, going back up to 10 years, to determine the probabilities of being booked on a specific date and look for data for future occupancy to understand how the booking pace is performing.
Last year, they launched a new tool called Beacon, which they can install on the direct booking website of their partners to track the consumer search demand on that website and combine that search data with the OTAs data to adjust prices in real-time.
The new tool can also provide search-powered insights “on where your guests are searching from on a global heatmap, what data they’re searching for, what are the booking windows, what are the lengths of stay, what are the amenities they’re after,” Roman adds.
Looking at the STR Australian Market
Roman emphasizes that Beyond tailored its pricing tools to the Australian market to meet regional differences in tourism and travel patterns. They use their data for the area—scraping data from the OTAs and sourcing data from the connected accounts.
Then, Beyond’s science and revenue management teams analyze these data and consider local and national events, seasonality, and hyperlocal factors like differences between suburbs and downtown areas. They constantly review and verify the data and adjust the pricing strategies. “It’s finding that right balance of strong ADRs in the peak periods and good occupancies in the off-peak or shoulder months. And that kind of tailored approach ensures our pricing tools are responsive to this unique seasonal dynamic of each tourist destination in Australia,” Roman explains.
As the discussion progresses, Roman also recommends some strategies hosts should consider to stay competitive and discusses upcoming features and updates users can expect from Beyond.
Listen to the full episode of the latest Hospitable Hosts podcast to find out how you can benefit from the automation dynamic pricing algorithms provide and learn about effective strategies you should consider to stay ahead of the market trends and maximize your rental income.
