At PriceLabs, we’re thrilled to announce our most significant upgrade: The Breakthrough Release. This isn’t just a step forward—it’s a giant leap for property managers and revenue management teams.
Fueled by cutting-edge data science and user feedback, this Breakthrough Release marks a pivotal moment for us, our suite of products, and our community of users.
Specially designed for medium to large property management companies, these innovations set the tone for the next chapter in revenue management. Whether you’re a property manager or a revenue manager, this transformative release promises substantial benefits for all.
This marks a significant milestone for our company. We’re grateful for the support of our customers and partners. You can find out here how our co-founders, Anurag, Richie, and Sana, consider this important release.
With more than 20 new features and tools, we’re pushing the boundaries of revenue management. Here’s what the Breakthrough Release delivers:
- Enhanced Precision and Relevance in Pricing
- Efficient and Streamlined Operations
- Swift Access to Critical Metrics
- Industry Recognition and Innovation
- Global Solutions for Short-Term, Mid-Term, and Multi-Unit Rentals
Let’s delve into the innovative tools featured in the Breakthrough release.
Breakthrough Release’s star feature: Hyper Local Pulse (HLP) Revolutionizes Dynamic Pricing
Meet Hyper Local Pulse (HLP), our revolutionary dynamic pricing algorithm. As evident from the name – it harnesses a hyper-local data set to optimize your rates to maximize revenues. HLP ensures unparalleled precision and adaptability in pricing strategies.
Within three months of using HLP, new PriceLabs users experience an average 26% boost in RevPar (Revenue per Available Night).
HLP’s Key Features and Benefits:
With HLP, you get:
- Hyper-local Relevance: Leverage hyper-local comp-sets for pricing decisions, enabling unmatched precision and relevance in adjusting for seasonality and specific days of the week.
- Improved Event and Holiday pricing: Our system has been enriched with a four-way event detection. It looks at the pacing from the previous year, picks up early demand signals for upcoming dates, takes cues from future competitor pricing, and incorporates hotel price indications.
- Rapid Market Adaptability: The swift response mechanism guarantees you seize the full potential of responsive seasonal and event pricing.
- Time-saving: Enjoy a significant reduction in the need for manual pricing interventions.
- Transparency: Our data science team has published how the algorithm was conceived and what data is used.
A quick look under the hood of our new pricing algorithm
The switch to HLP has been a two-year exercise in the making. HLP has been enabled by some game-changing technical improvements we have made. Here’s a summary:
If you want to know more about how HLP works, you can read this in-depth overview from our data science team on how the pricing algorithm works.
What Our Users Are Saying About Hyper Local Pulse (HLP):
“The new algorithm has really taken an already stacked pricing tool to the next level! The way the new algorithm updates daily to changing market conditions is truly amazing. Grand Welcome has entered 50+ new markets in the last 2 years with another 20+ markets going live before the end of 2023. This is going to save us around 75% in setup time for new markets and allow us to put more focus on the areas that matter.”
Jon S | Business Intelligence Manager at Grand Welcome
“The reduction in manual overrides is a game-changer for us. With the new algorithm, we find ourselves relying less on manual interventions, allowing us to efficiently scale our portfolio without sacrificing accuracy or control.”
Adrienn Janics | Revenue Management at Angelhost
“The new algorithm better leverages PriceLabs’ built-in seasonality & demand adjustments to optimally set up your pricing calendar. Not only have we seen an improvement in Day-of-Week pricing, but we’ve also seen an improvement in peak demand date pricing.”
Fabio Castiblanco | Head of Revenue & Analytics at SoSuite
Availability and Migration
We invite you to experience the HLP difference, a testament to PriceLabs’ commitment to innovation and excellence. To find out whether your listings are already running under the new algorithm or how to switch to it, read this article.
Performance Metrics
Successful revenue management relies on swift action. When handling many listings, pinpointing the underperformers can be time-consuming. While our Pricing Dashboard and Multi-Calendar pages offered Occupancy metrics, we recognized the need for a broader set.
Introducing our enhanced Performance Metrics: Filter and sort with more than 40 metrics tailored to your monitoring preferences. By focusing on the metrics most relevant to your business, you can efficiently assess your listings’ performance and adjust where needed.
Smart Presets
While PriceLabs’ algorithm works hyper-locally and optimizes revenue, every individual perceives risks differently. Thus, the need for customizing PriceLabs to your expectations comes in. While we build world-class algorithms, we’ve continued to focus on making PriceLabs’ as customizable as needed. PriceLabs offers over 30 customization options; however, navigating through them can feel daunting, especially for newcomers.
Our Solution? Smart Presets. This tool effortlessly guides you in adjusting PriceLabs to fit your property type, offering hands-on suggestions for optimal settings.
Benefits:
- Specify the type of listing—whether it’s a short-term rental, mid-term rental, or a multi-unit building. We’ll then provide you with a recommended suite of customizations and advice on value selections.
- Save time and get the best out of PriceLabs by focusing on the essential settings.
- With Smart Presets, navigating through many settings is straightforward and user-friendly.
Desktop App
When editing a large portfolio, a lag or delay can disrupt your workflow, resulting in time lost in your busy day.
With the PriceLabs Desktop App, we’re bringing solutions to your computer:
✔ Easy Access: Download our app onto your computer. Once installed, no more opening the browser to access PriceLabs. It sits on your desktop for quick access.
✔ Increase Efficiency: Using your computer’s capabilities, PriceLabs’ desktop app runs faster and more smoothly than on browsers. This allows for effortless navigation, management, and updating of vast portfolios, ensuring a seamless user experience
You might be wondering, what else are we doing to improve response times? We have been working on making our algorithms and data processing fast. In addition, we are working on making the multi-calendar faster – coming later this year.
Team Management
Empower your team, ensure accountability, and monitor with clarity— PriceLabs has got you covered.
✔ Simplified Delegation: Granting view/edit permissions to a group ensures team members can independently manage all listings within that group, promoting efficiency and ownership.
✔ Transparent Oversight: Our detailed account logs let you quickly identify who made what change and when, which ensures transparency and accountability.
We are working on many more changes to make team management easier. Would love to hear if you see any limitations with current functionalities!
Dive Deeper: More Tools and Features of the Breakthrough Release
Intelligence: Reduce the need for human intervention
Market-driven Last-Minute and Far-Out Customizations:
The data access and elasticity models we created for HLP allow us to better calculate market-last-minute and far-out customizations.
In an industry first, these new versions of the customizations dynamically adjust the default values for last-minute discounts and far-out premiums based on daily updated hyper-local market data. Unlike competitors who rely on fixed values for these discounts and premiums, PriceLabs dynamically adjusts to each listing’s market conditions. Read this article for some observations from our data science team while working on market-based last-minute and far-out customizations.
Benefits:
- Optimal Pricing Strategy: Only customizations in the market that leverage extensive market data to provide accurate and competitive pricing recommendations. This ensures properties remain relevant in changing market conditions.
- User Flexibility: While the system offers automated insights for maximizing revenue, users retain the control to tailor pricing according to their specific needs and preferences.
Note: Only users of the HLP algorithm can access these customizations.
Enhanced Min Stay Recommendation Engine and Min Stay Flexibility
Our experiments found that optimal use of Minimum Stay restrictions can help you increase your revenues by 5-10%. Yet, calculating minimum stay restrictions for each market and listing is time-consuming and math-heavy.
Our data science team has developed the industry-first and only Min Stay Recommendation Engine, which provides annual minimum stay recommendations and specific seasonal suggestions for months that diverge from typical patterns. For this release, we’ve improved the recommendation engine by factoring in the individual performance of the listing alongside market trends.
Now, tweaking your minimum stay restrictions to optimize revenue is a matter of a few clicks.
Min Stay Flexibility
- Min Stay Profiles: If you manage a few properties or your minimum stay restriction changes by season – setting Min Stay customization in PriceLabs was time-consuming. Enter Min Stay Profiles. Set once and use multiple times!
- Custom Seasonal Profile + Profiles: Min Stay Profiles can now be integrated with Custom Seasonal Profiles, ensuring hosts and property managers account for seasonal demand. For example, longer minimum stays during peak seasons can enhance occupancy.
- Advanced Min Stay Customization: Besides the standard set of minimum stay customizations, PriceLabs offers additional customizations like Adjacent minimum stay customization – used to prevent or reduce gaps and some on-demand customizations.
Seasonality customization
With HLP, we can offer additional flexibility to users via our Seasonality Customization (formerly called Custom Seasonal Factor). You can now easily select between 4 out of the box pricing strategies based on your preference:
- Conservative: This setting moderates the calculated seasonality, slightly reducing prices in the off-peak season and raising them mildly during peak season.
- Recommended: The default setting utilizes the standard seasonality determined by our HLP.
- Aggressive: Intensifies the PriceLabs’ seasonality by significantly raising prices during high-demand periods and lowering them more during low-demand times.
- No Seasonality: Ideal for properties catering to consistent demand, like those serving business travelers year-round. This option deactivates seasonal pricing adjustments, maintaining a steady rate year-round.
Hotel Weights and Hotel CompSets customizations
Tailored Algorithm Customizations for Multi-unit Operators:
What’s New? For operators of multi-unit accommodations like aparthotels and serviced apartments, we’re rolling out advanced customizations within our Smart Presets to provide refined control over our pricing algorithm.
- Hotel Weights: Recognizing that certain accommodations, such as aparthotels, can be influenced by short-term rental and hotel market trends, we are introducing the “Hotel Weights” feature. This allows operators to determine the extent to which hotel pricing trends impact their property’s rates. In essence, it offers the ability to balance or adjust the influence of hotel-related pricing data on your listings. It primarily benefits hotels or hotel-like establishments.
- Hotel CompSets: Should you believe that local hotel rates have a greater bearing on your property’s prices than neighboring short-term rentals, our “Hotel CompSets” customization is designed for you. This tool lets you select which neighboring hotels should influence your pricing strategy. By default, PriceLabs considers the 10 nearest hotels when determining pricing.
Base Price and Minimum Price Nudges:
We’ve introduced ‘nudges,’ our smart data-backed notifications, to fine-tune your pricing strategy. These nudges include:
- Base Price Nudge: It gives you a heads-up when an adjustment to your base price might be needed. The Base Price Nudge ensures that your listing’s foundation price remains in sync with current market trends, enhancing the likelihood of consistent bookings.
- Minimum Price Nudge: It helps ensure your listings remain attractive, especially during off-peak seasons or slower markets. Sometimes, even if you lower your Base Price, you might still not get bookings if it’s too close to your Minimum Price. Our new nudges ensure a balance between your base and minimum price, optimizing your chances of getting booked.
Benefits:
- Streamlined Revenue Management: Takes the guesswork out of pricing, guiding you towards the best decisions.
- Stay Ahead with Automated Alerts: Reduces the need for constant monitoring, ensuring your properties are competitively priced.
Analysis: Quickly evaluate performance
Pacing Charts and Booking charts in Portfolio Analytics
The Portfolio-Level Pacing Charts and Booking Reports are analytic tools that give users a comprehensive view of their listing’s performance. Users can gauge their market position and make informed decisions by comparing current rates and occupancy metrics against historical data and market averages. In response to your feedback for this release, we’ve kept the booking chart as it is but defaulted the graphs to display a monthly view instead of a daily view.
Benefits:
- Strategic Positioning: Users can understand and adjust their pricing and listing strategies based on market trends and past performance.
- Enhanced Efficiency: Quick access to detailed insights and reports enables timely reactions to changing market conditions, maximizing profitability.
Market Dashboard’s Portable Comp-Sets
Market Dashboard provides a comprehensive snapshot of the competitive environment for your listings. It’s an essential tool, allowing you to curate sets of competitors for easy reference and integration with other PriceLabs products. For this release, we’ve introduced powerful filters that help you zero in on the exact local market you want to analyze.
- Choose a specific market that suits your listings, moving beyond the confines of just a neighborhood or city.
- Apply detailed filters to curate a competitor set tailored to your business needs (e.g., create a market view with only beachfront 3-bedroom listings with a pool and guest ratings above 4.7).
- Save your curated set for quick access within Market Dashboard, or utilize it in Neighborhood Data and Portfolio Analytics for performance comparison. These comparisons include static data like occupancy and constantly updated projections such as future occupancy and “same time, last year” data for instant comparisons.
Compare Competitor Calendar
Located in the Neighborhood Data tab, the “Compare Competitor Calendar” tool allows you to compare your listing prices with up to 10 local competitors, offering insights for a 365-day timeframe.
Benefits:
- Informed Pricing Strategy: Adjust your rates competitively by directly comparing with neighboring listings.
- Spot Trends: Detect pricing patterns and booked nights among competitors.
- Detailed Insights: Direct access to competitors’ Airbnb listing pages provides a comprehensive view of their offerings, from photos to amenities
Hotel Data with Length-of-stay (LOS)
The recently introduced Hotel Data tab provides a comprehensive insight into the local hotel market. This is especially useful for businesses offering short-term accommodations, like apartments or aparthotels, which often find themselves competing with neighboring hotels.
Benefits:
- Competitive Pricing Analysis: Select and monitor up to 350 nearby hotels to get a grasp on their pricing. This insight allows you to tailor your own rates to ensure you remain a viable option for potential customers.
- Length of Stay (LOS) Insights: This tool lets you see how hotels around you alter their prices based on how long a guest stays. So, if many local hotels give discounts for stays of 3 nights or more, you could do something similar to attract longer bookings. Conversely, if hotels up their rates for shorter stays, you might offer a better rate for short stays to get those quick bookings.
Events and Holidays Calendar Feature (Beta):
We’ve just launched the Events and Holidays Calendar feature. For now, it’s only available to a select group of beta users. You will find this feature in two spots:
- Pricing Page: While viewing a specific listing’s pricing calendar, you’ll see an Event/Holidays section right next to it.
- Multi-Calendar Page: When you’re on this page, just click on the context menu for a specific listing to access it.
Benefits:
- Increased Transparency: Get a clear view of upcoming events, holidays, and potential high-demand dates. This clarity can shed light on why certain price recommendations are set for specific dates.
- Informed Adjustments: Spotting these special dates allows you to tweak your prices or minimum stay settings. This is particularly handy if you notice that the recommended prices may not fully reflect the demand due to a nearby event or holiday.
Plus, if you’re aware of an event that isn’t listed, you can report it using this feature. By doing so, you’re not only staying ahead of the curve but also helping to enhance our tool for everyone.
Workflow: Work faster
Access data via API and CSVs
We understand that businesses, particularly property managers and revenue management teams, often require our data integrated directly into their internal systems. To cater to this, our platform allows users to download various tables and graphs in CSV format easily. Furthermore, for those seeking seamless integration, we offer a direct API to connect PriceLabs to your systems.
As we continue to develop and expand our platform, we remain committed to updating these data transfer avenues, ensuring you can always access the most recent and comprehensive data.
- Download data in CSV formats: You can download data from various tools, charts, and graphs. We’ve enhanced the CSV file you downloaded from the Pricing Dashboard for this release. It now includes two crucial pieces of information: the last synced date and any notes associated with each listing. Booked information from the Neighborhood Data graphs
- Customer API: You can also connect with us directly using our Customer API to download data into your systems.
Also, note that we are continuously working on and remain committed to making various data endpoints available via API or CSV.
Sub-Groups
Managing hundreds of listings can pose challenges. One of the significant challenges is ensuring consistent and optimized pricing across various listings without having to customize each one individually. Grouping listings together and applying shared settings can save time and effort, and PriceLabs understands this need.
PriceLabs eases this with:
- Account-Level Customizations: Uniformly adjust settings across all listings connected to a specific PMS, Channel Manager, or Booking Channel.
- Group-Level Customizations: Group listings based on criteria like city names or listing types for collective adjustments.
- Sub-Group Customizations: Delving deeper into customization, we introduce Sub-Groups. While main groups allow you to categorize listings broadly, subgroups refine this even further. Imagine having different neighborhoods with their own 2-bedroom properties. Subgroups let you tweak settings for these 2-bedrooms within their respective neighborhood groups, providing a detailed layer of pricing control.
Choose Your Calendar Start Day
Some people like their calendars to start on a Monday, while others prefer Sunday. We’ve heard you! Now, you can pick the day you want your pricing calendar to start.
Benefits:
- Efficient Planning: Set your calendar the way you’re used to seeing it, making planning a breeze.
- Same Look Everywhere: Whether checking one date or looking at the whole year, your start-day choice stays consistent across our platform.
Expiry Date Option for Date-Specific Overrides (DSO) and Group/Account level DSO:
Imagine you implement a Date-Specific Override (DSO) to secure a higher rate for specific dates. What if those high hopes don’t materialize into bookings? Then, the DSO may obstruct last-minute bookings by counteracting discounts meant to fill vacancies.
To solve this issue, we’ve introduced an advanced setting that allows you to set an expiry timeframe for a part of the DSO. This feature ensures that your DSOs don’t get in the way of potential last-minute bookings.
For instance, if you’ve set overrides for Nov 25 to Dec 5 and you’ve set your DSO to “Erase all overrides if they are last minute defined by 7 days”, here’s what happens when you approach Nov 20:
- Overrides for Nov 25 and Nov 26 will be erased to attract last-minute bookings.
- Overrides from Nov 27 to Dec 5 remain active.
When managing many listings, making individual adjustments for each one, especially for holidays or events, can become a cumbersome task. For a more streamlined approach:
- Use Account/PMS-level date-specific overrides when you want uniform changes across all your listings.
- If different property clusters need separate adjustments, opt for Group-level date-specific overrides. This is particularly useful when specific sets of properties have unique requirements.
Smart Check-In and Check-Out
In some markets, booking properties can be less flexible than other places. Property managers typically fix certain days for guest check-ins and check-outs, sometimes resulting in ‘orphan gaps’ – those vacant one or two-day spaces between longer reservations. Such fixed schedules can often lead to lost revenue opportunities and an inefficient use of property availability.
Our new feature offers two smart functionalities:
Block Check-in/Check-outs that Leave Orphan Gaps:
This feature intelligently prevents bookings that would result in undesirable one or two-day vacancies. For instance, if there’s a potential for a 1-night gap between bookings, the system will block reservations that would cause this, ensuring more prolonged and continuous occupancy.
Allow Check-in/Check-outs on Adjacent Nights:
Property managers often have specific preferred check-in and check-out days, which can inadvertently lead to gaps in the calendar. This feature allows the system to override those fixed days when necessary. For instance, if a property manager prefers check-ins on Fridays and a booking ends on a Thursday, the system can adjust to allow a check-in on that Thursday, thus optimizing occupancy.
Please note that smart check-in and check-out feature is available on request. Contact support@pricelabs.co to activate it.
100 PMS and channel managers Integrations
PriceLabs has set an industry record by integrating with over 100 PMSs and channel managers. This milestone underscores the trust and value tech providers across the industry place in connecting with PriceLabs to benefit their users. In our latest update, we’re thrilled to introduce integration with two more PMSs:
Data Access: Leverage the most powerful data set
STR Index
Dive into free market reports with PriceLabs’ STR Index, your gateway to global short-term rental data. Whether you’re interested in a specific country or region or want a worldwide overview, the STR Index has you covered. Track and explore metrics from 2020 and get insights into the upcoming year, with monthly data refreshes ensuring you’re always equipped with the most recent insights.
Benefits:
- Broad Coverage: Gain comprehensive insights into any short-term rental market globally, understanding shifts and trends.
- Tailored Insights: Zoom into specific geographies using the Country and Region filters, ensuring the data is most relevant to your interests and operations.
- Versatile Dashboards: With three distinct sections—Compare, Trend, and Pacing—you have multiple ways to interpret and analyze data.
- Compare: Observe year-over-year changes in key metrics such as Active Listings, Occupancy, RevPAR, and ADR.
- Trend: Visualize the trajectory of these metrics over recent years, ensuring you grasp the larger narrative.
- Pacing: Peek into the future, contrasting upcoming year projections with past data for metrics like Occupancy, ADR, and RevPAR.
Revenue Estimator
The Revenue Estimator lets you assess a property’s revenue potential simply by inputting its address. It is a free and simple tool to use. For a more detailed report on potential revenue and local market conditions, create a Market Dashboard.
Benefits:
- For investors and property managers, this is a data goldmine when evaluating a new property’s viability for their portfolio.
- Make informed decisions based on essential metrics estimating a property’s revenue potential.
10,000-listing Market Dashboard
For just $39.99 per month, our enhanced Market Dashboard plan provides you:
- Broader Data Access: Dive into insights from up to 10,000 listings, refining your decision-making.
- Superior Market Analysis: Assess potential markets and investment properties with a wider lens.
- Optimized Pricing: Leverage extensive data to pinpoint competitive pricing trends.
- Precision in Comparisons: Evaluate your performance against a vast array of properties, ensuring clarity on your market stance.
- In-depth Trend Insights: Recognize intricate trends to fine-tune your pricing and occupancy strategies.
We are constantly striving to make your journey in revenue management easier! We hope you will find these updates valuable. Please reach out to us if you have any questions.