As a property management company that oversees multiple rental properties, you know that setting your listings’ nightly prices – while consistently meeting your revenue goals – is a difficult but crucial aspect of your job. In order to ensure that your rentals are priced competitively for every day, holiday, season or event of the year, it requires a well thought out approach to revenue management.
In this product webinar, we walk you through the elements that go into building your revenue management strategy, and how Guesty’s unique set of features can help you to easily implement a 3-part strategy that covers all your bases.
See the full webinar below, and keep reading for a recap of what we cover:
To review, we first touch on the factors that must be considered when pricing your rentals and building a revenue strategy:
- The right base prices: What prices are right for your rentals based on your local market and competing properties?
- How prices change: How do prices change in your market according to holiday, season, and any other factors that will have an impact on the frequency of guests choosing properties?
- Increasing the potential of your listings being booked: How can you provide multiple combinations of pricing offers and discounts that will appeal to as many segments as possible?
Next we dive into the right tools to put things into action. To help you implement this sophisticated pricing strategy, we built our Revenue Management Tool, consisting of 3 layers that take you through each phase of the process:
1. Rate Strategies
Rate strategies are rules that define how your base price fluctuates according to different days or events. These rules enable you to automate price and minimum night adjustments at scale, helping you to save time, optimize the balance between occupancy and revenues, and avoid any risk of human error. These are year-long strategies that you build once and put into effect for an ongoing period, with adjustments being made on an as needs-basis.
Some example types of rate strategy rules would include using a ‘recurring days’ rule to increase a listing’s base price 10% every Friday-Sunday, or using seasonal rules to increase the prices during high season.
To get started creating your Rate Strategy on Guesty, find step-by-step instructions on our Help Center.
2. Rate Plans
Rate plans allow you to create additional pricing options that give guests different prices to choose from. In this product webinar, we highlight that by offering multiple different pricing packages that appeal to as many different needs as possible, rate plans will help you to increase your appeal and thus, increase your likelihood of being booked. For example, offering guests a nightly rate that includes breakfast and another rate with free cancellation – plus your original price that includes neither option – will pay off in more bookings.
Additionally, if part of your overall pricing strategy were to be targeting a specific audience, then you could also use rate plans to do that by offering special rates to that audience only. Because rate plans are ongoing strategies that you set and let run indefinitely, you would use them to create pricing packages that are mainstays within your overall offering.
3. Promotions
Promotions are a feature used to increase conversion around one-time, short-term opportunities – like a big event in town or the end of a season. Unlike Rate Strategies and Rate plans which are applied to your prices for ongoing periods, Promotions are something you apply on top of those prices only for a short period of time as an effort to draw some extra attention to your listings for one-off instances.
The last part of our webinar will dive into how offering Promotions will also increase your search results score on Booking.com, giving you a higher ranking on the platform’s search results pages. Plus, when your original price is displayed with a red line through it and a ‘sale’ price is shown, this is a sure-fire way to lure guests in.
For help getting started using our Promotions feature, visit our Help Center.
When you have the right strategy laid out, these features make it easy for any property management company to implement an in-depth revenue strategy that will keep your prices competitive and save you hours of manual work.
