Pricing your vacation rental right

Keeping up with market demand

Calculating the market demand for holiday rentals in your area can seem daunting, but with the right information at your disposal you can easily identify your ideal pricing strategy. First of all, you should take a look at what other vacation rentals in your area are charging; and compare this with what you have to offer. Consider you space, size and amenities when making these comparisons. AirDNA is a provider of short-term rental data analytics, which you can check to see average pricing rates in your area. It’s also really important to gain and understand of what guests are willing to pay too. What may be reasonable to you may be different to travellers. Next, get to know seasonality patterns in your local area, are guests more likely to travel during a certain time of the year? Not only does popularity depend on the season, there are other things to consider such as local events and national holidays. With all of this data, you can then tailor a pricing strategy to ensure your rental is competitively priced against other properties in the area. 

Use a Smart Pricing tool

Smart Pricing refers to a tool which vacation rental hosts can use to automatically adjust pricing to market conditions, in order to ensure competitive rates. The Travelnest Smart Pricing tool is powered by Wheelhouse, and leverages a variety of external data sources to conduct an ongoing analysis of your local market and determine an optimal price for each night. Periods of low demand will lower your price, and periods of high demand will increase your price. All you need to do is enter your minimum required nightly rate and, using the factors mentioned above, your pricing will vary depending on the demand any given time. It takes seconds to switch on Smart Pricing, and after that there is no further manual input required.

Offering enough availability

It’s really important to make sure you also have an open, flexible calendar to allow for as many bookings as possible. Over 99% of all vacation rental bookings are received within 365 days of arrival – each traveller is different though; and this varies between those who choose to book last minute, and those who prefer to plan ahead and book well in advance. Therefore, we always recommend having plenty of availability in advance, at least a year or two with little restriction. For example, a lengthy minimum night stay. Fortunately, Smart Pricing sets personalised and up-to-date nightly pricing for your property 365 days in advance, so you never need to worry about setting new pricing periods.