Vrbo Rate Automation: What Is It, and Should You Use It for Your Rental?

If you list your vacation rental property on Vrbo, setting the right nightly rates is crucial for your success on the platform. When travelers search for a place to stay, pricing is one of the key factors that influence their decision to book.

To attract bookings, it’s important to set competitive rates that reflect current market trends in supply and demand. It’s also essential to ensure that your rates not only cover your operational costs but also allow you to make a profit.

There are numerous factors to consider when determining the optimal rate for each day. In April 2025, Vrbo introduced a new feature—a built-in rate automation tool that provides pricing insights based on data. In this blog post, we’ll talk about how Vrbo’s rate automation works, whether you should use it for your listings, and if there’s a better alternative.

What Is Vrbo Rate Automation?

Rate Automation is Vrbo’s data-backed insights tool, featuring rate automation capabilities. Hosts can access it within Vrbo’s MarketMaker, a free comparison tool. Rate automation is designed to adjust nightly rates dynamically based on historical data, competitor pricing, and real-time market demand and supply.

The rate automation tool is a complimentary service, so Vrbo hosts don’t have to pay for using it. Once you turn it on, it will provide you with rate suggestions tailored to your market and vacation rental property, allowing you to focus on growing your business.

You’ll be able to scale faster if you automate your routine operations using short-term rental software like Hospitable. Our STR super app offers a comprehensive set of features, helping to put your business on autopilot.

Vrbo Rate Automation: How Does It Work?

You can activate Vrbo’s rate automation if you select MarketMaker in your Vrbo owner dashboard. Next, select 'Rate automation' and, in your side panel, set your rate range, duration of rate adjustments, and any seasonal rules.  Then you need to check the box to accept the terms and conditions, and finally, select Turn on rate automation.

Rate automation adjusts rates from your base rate every 48 hours based on MarketMaker’s data. The tool can quickly monitor millions of available data points, including supply and demand trends, seasonality, rates of booked versus available properties, historically booked rates, property features, and amenities.

You can customize your rate settings to be in control of your pricing:

• Add minimum and maximum rate limits so that your suggested rates will never exceed or fall below your defined thresholds.
• Set seasonal rules to have unique minimum and maximum rate limits for specific time periods, such as holidays and peak and low seasons.
• Exclude certain dates you prefer to set manually (you can set up to 10 date ranges to be excluded from rate changes).
• Easily override suggested rates or disable automation at any time, for any reason.
• Choose how far in advance the tool should adjust rates (90 days or 180 days).

Should You Use Vrbo Rate Automation for Your Listings?

Rate automation gives Vrbo hosts and property managers a helping hand in setting competitive prices so they can focus on marketing their vacation rentals and spend more time on enhancing the guest experience.  However, the tool offers only a basic in-platform solution, so it may not be the best option for you.

• The rate automation algorithm focuses on internal data from Vrbo’s comparison tool MarketMaker, which may not provide a complete picture of your local vacation rental market. It doesn't consider data from other major online travel platforms and local listing sites.
• It’s also important to remember that the rate automation is aligned with Vrbo's interests. Since the platform charges a commission for each booking, the tool prioritizes bookings over host income. It may lower rates to attract more guests, which means you may earn less per reservation.
• This complimentary service is limited only to the Vrbo platform, just like Airbnb Smart Pricing works only for Airbnb listings. If you market your property on multiple booking channels, it will be challenging to control your nightly rates and maintain parity.

What Are the Alternatives to Using Vrbo Rate Automation?

Adjusting your nightly rates manually based on your market research isn’t the best decision, especially if you manage several STR properties listed on multiple channels, because of the rapidly changing market trends and fierce competition. The process is time-consuming and may lead to overpricing or underpricing, resulting in lost profits.

A better alternative is to rely on Hospitable's built-in Dynamic Pricing solution. It can help you find the optimum price to maximize your revenue and ensure a high occupancy rate with the right guests across your connected booking channels, including Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, Agoda, and your Direct booking website.

You won’t have to manually update your prices. Hospitable’s intelligent pricing engine will automatically adjust your rates using millions of data points to respond to market conditions in real time. The best part is that our Dynamic Pricing feature is included in the Host, Professional, and Mogul subscription plans at no additional cost.

Our Dynamic Pricing is embedded within the Hospitable booking calendar, so you’ll be able to manage all your bookings in one place. Activating this feature is easy. You need to choose your pricing strategy (conservative, recommended, or aggressive) and set the minimum and maximum price limits for your properties.

As soon as you enable the Dynamic Pricing feature, Hospitable will automatically adjust your prices to maximize revenue generation for your properties and maintain optimal occupancy. It will immediately push recommended rates to all your channels. Prices are then automatically updated every 24 hours based on the latest market conditions.

With Hospitable’s Dynamic Pricing, you maintain complete control over your pricing strategy. You can periodically review your performance and make ongoing adjustments to your dynamic pricing setup to maximize both occupancy and revenue.

Hospitable also integrates with leading third-party dynamic pricing tools specifically designed for short-term rental properties. They can help you maximize your revenue with intelligent price recommendations. These third-party tools utilize complex algorithms to automatically determine the optimal price based on multiple factors, including supply and demand, seasonality, and day-of-the-week trends, among others; however, they are not free.

Still, if you want to explore alternative solutions that can help you automate the rate-setting process, you can visit our Integrations page to find a list of dynamic pricing tools that Hospitable integrates with.