Price is one of the most critical factors travelers consider when deciding which vacation rental to book. That means that your Vrbo pricing strategy can have a huge impact on your occupancy rate and your overall revenue.
To maximize your income, you must set competitive nightly rates that reflect current supply and demand and your historical data. It’s not an easy task as market conditions are constantly changing, and there are many things to consider to determine the best price for each day.
In April 2025, Vrbo launched its built-in pricing tool, Rate Automation, which can help hosts set competitive prices for their listings. There are also third-party tools that allow you to implement a Vrbo smart pricing strategy and maximize your revenue, automating your work.
Read on to find out how such tools can help you implement dynamic pricing for your Vrbo rental and win bookings at the right price 365 days a year.
Automation is the only option if you’re looking for an easier way to run your short-term rental business and scale faster. Reliable vacation rental software like Hospitable can help you automate almost all your routine tasks, saving you hours of valuable time that you could spend on doing things that matter.
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Why Should You Use Vrbo Dynamic Pricing Strategy?
In a constantly changing vacation rental market, learning how to price your Vrbo property can be difficult to master. If you set your nightly rates too low at any time of the year, you risk losing money, and if your rates are too high, you may miss out on bookings.
That means you need to focus on optimizing occupancy and nightly rates and put all the right practices in place that will help you maximize your income in every season. Here is what you can do to price your Vrbo listing effectively.
Plan for long-term success early. If your Vrbo listing is new and has no reviews, consider pricing your property 15-20% lower than your competitors to get your first bookings and some positive reviews. Over time, those 5-star Vrbo guest reviews can help you win more bookings at higher prices.
Research your competition to understand what similar properties in your area are charging, and use this information to determine your Vrbo pricing strategy. Although doing research is a labor-intensive process, it will give you real insight into how your vacation home should be priced to perform well in the local market.
Offer promotions and discounts to make your listing more attractive to travelers and get more bookings. For example, you can offer discounts for long-term stays (7+ and 28+ nights) and the Vrbo military discount.
Don’t charge the same rate all year round because fixed pricing doesn’t account for any changes in guest demand in your area. Using this approach, you could leave money on the table when demand is high and lose to similar properties offering competitive pricing when fewer people are booking.
Instead, you should adjust your pricing for high and low seasons and a shoulder season to secure higher rates when there’s demand and encourage bookings with lower rates when things are slow. You should also consider local events that may create peak demand for vacation rentals. Additionally, you may consider setting different prices for different days of the week, with higher rates on weekends.
As you see, setting the right price for your Vrbo properties can be challenging. You should consider different factors to reach the best balance between nightly rates and bookings that will allow you to maximize your revenue.
The solution is to use a dynamic pricing strategy when setting prices for your Vrbo listings. It’s a common approach in today’s travel landscape that allows businesses to respond rapidly to constantly changing market conditions. Dynamic pricing considers historical patterns and daily changes in demand and will help you optimize your rates to increase bookings and maximize your profits.
Vrbo Smart Pricing: How Does It Work?
The dynamic pricing strategy requires access to a lot of data, so Vrbo offers hosts a free comparison tool, MarketMaker. It calculates current market conditions for vacation rentals and provides valuable insights to help hosts make informed pricing decisions.
MarketMaker collects and analyzes relevant real-time market data from your and your competitors’ Property Management Systems to inform you about the average rates and occupancy in your market or competitive set. It also notifies you of market changes and highlights pricing opportunities to increase your rates.
However, you’ll need to analyze the data and make all the changes to update your pricing manually. It involves a lot of work and is time-consuming, especially if you manage multiple properties.
Hosts can also turn on Rate Automation, a new pricing tool within Vrbo’s MarketMaker. It’s a data-backed insights tool with rate automation capabilities that are now available on the Vrbo dashboard.
This Vrbo smart pricing tool can quickly monitor a lot of available data points, including supply and demand trends, seasonality, rates of booked vs. available properties, historically booked rates, property features, and amenities. Then, it provides customized rate suggestions to help host prices be competitive. Rate automation looks for opportunities and adjusts rates every 48 hours.
Hosts can maintain control over their pricing by setting minimum and maximum rate limits and excluding certain dates they prefer to set manually. They can also change adjusted rates or disable automation at any time.
Built-in Vrbo pricing tool gives hosts and property managers a semi-hands-off approach to pricing, but it works only for Vrbo listings, just like Airbnb Smart Pricing is limited to the Airbnb platform. So if you list your short-term rental or mid-term rental properties on multiple channels, controlling rates and ensuring parity can be very challenging.
Many vacation rental hosts use paid alternatives to Vrbo smart pricing to take care of this task. These dynamic pricing tools can automate your pricing on Vrbo, work with listings on other vacation rental websites, and integrate with multiple vacation rental property management systems. They can help you automatically push dynamic pricing to various channels, saving time and effort.
Third-Party Vrbo Pricing Tools: What Can They Do for You and Is There an Alternative?
Third-party dynamic pricing tools can help optimize your rates to increase revenue and bookings. They can also automatically adjust the rates in response to the changing market conditions in your area in real time. Moreover, using a dynamic pricing tool will help keep nightly prices consistent across all booking platforms where you list your property.
The best Vrbo pricing tools use advanced machine-learning algorithms to analyze current market data and historical trends and feature advanced customization. They can help you simplify setting dynamic pricing for your vacation rentals by eliminating the need for calculations or guesswork, but they can be costly.
Still, you can get your pricing right across multiple booking channels without overpaying for a dynamic pricing solution if you opt for Hospitable. Our STR super app comes with built-in Dynamic Pricing, which is included in Host, Professional, and Mogul plans at no additional cost.
Boost your occupancy and revenue
You can use dynamic pricing on some or all of your properties. If you enable this feature, Hospitable’s proprietary pricing engine will automatically adjust your rates based on market demand, seasonality, day of the week, local events, and other factors to help maximize your revenue and maintain optimal occupancy.
You can control how aggressive you want your pricing strategies to be and align them with your overall business goals. You can tailor your Vrbo pricing strategy to focus on increasing occupancy rate, maximizing revenue, or finding a balance between the two.
Final Thought
Staying on top of your rates is crucial for your success on Vrbo, and a smart way to achieve this is to apply dynamic pricing. However, tracking down and analyzing information about local trends, seasonality, and historical performance of your listing, as well as adjusting prices manually, can be very challenging and time-consuming.
The easiest way to optimize your pricing strategy is to use a dynamic pricing tool that analyzes historical and market data to provide tailored, automated pricing recommendations. It can help you ensure you’re setting the right rates without spending hours of your precious time and leaving money on the table.
