Edit: Actually, to be more accurate, it didn't feel like much of a "marketplace" at all, and that's where the charm was. You weren't terribly aware of supply and demand and the rest of econ 101 when using it.
In talking to a lot of hosts, as well as hosting ourselves, we've learned that (a) pricing your home is really hard, and (b) there is a LOT of work that goes into being a great host. From cleaning your home to welcoming guests and answering inquiries, (not to mention the cost of food, furniture, linens, etc.), most hosts spend hours every week making sure their guests are safe & happy.
If we can help hosts by making it easier to accurately price their home, we think we can create a bigger incentive for great hosts to continue hosting.
* Edit :: I run operations at Beyond, have hosted for years on Airbnb, and helped design this - appreciate the question
Would definitely use the pricing tool, and maybe the management service too if I were Airbnb'ing my place.
On the other hand, in Boston, Montreal, and a plethora of international destinations, Airbnb 110% of the time. Most cities don't have the demand that Manhattan has, and everyone wants to make a quick buck renting their apartment out to some friendly guests. The markets tend to be so saturated with great places, from my experience, that raising the price is more likely going to hurt the probability of finding someone who will rent it.
I was in Boston in November. Normally there would be a range of listings in the $60-$120 range, and then some in the ultra-pricey $250-$500 range.
Except there was a yatch race on, an ALL but one of the affordable listings was booked. I researched, and there really were dozens of listings that were normally cheap, but they were full.
I fortunately got the last affordable place in town. But I would have been much happier if some of the other hosts had charged a small premium. I was almost forced into a luxury listing.
Its pretty rare that an individual hosts will have enough information to accurately/comfortably price their home.
By studying larger trends across a municipality, we think we can help paint a clearer picture for these hosts, both for short term price surges & also for how they should set the base price their home.
Tripping is the top metasearch site for vacation rentals with over 1 million homes worldwide. We also have the richest data set in the industry, so it'll be fun to see how our data compares with BeyondStays.
- Hotel metasearch is a real-time pricing and booking option. VRBO and AirBnB by and large are lead generation based so you don't have real time availability on a majority of the properties. This means that a lot of the listings may already be booked and you wouldn't know until you contact the owner.
- Location accuracy is a challenge. Home owners don't want to provide exact addresses due to privacy reasons so for a lot of properties, owners have chosen to provide an "approximate" location which leads to a lot of properties in a neighborhood sharing the same exact lat/long and a lot of stacked pins or clusters on a map.
For reference, here's a general idea of the number of property types: 300,000+ hotels, 550,000+ vacation homes, 300,000+ airbnb listings (lots of cross listing with vacation rental sites for sure), 50,000+ hostels = ~1M properties bookable after deduplication.
Take that, and SF's 14% hotel tax, and I think they're reaping what they've sowed.
When I was in vietnam, all I had to do was go around to a couple of hotels and ask for the price in person.
Many hotels are not advertised online. And even though the space is smaller, I prefer it over airbnb. More anonymity and room service.
Even without that, it's still cheaper in some cases to stay at a hotel and with the added bonus of room service.
Build tools and managers to till the kingdom then pray the king shows mercy and buys you out.
