What to Do After Finishing Your Free Trial: A Step-by-Step Guide to Optimize Your Listings

What to Do After Finishing Your Free Trial: A Step-by-Step Guide to Optimize Your Listings

Your PriceLabs free trial has come to an end, but this is just the beginning of maximizing your listing's potential. In this guide, we’ll walk you through essential steps to keep your listings optimized, monitor key metrics, and make data-driven adjustments to boost your revenue.

Before diving into the guide, it's crucial to understand that getting your base price right is the foundation of your pricing strategy. It’s the anchor that all your pricing adjustments, discounts, and premium rates are built upon. Setting your base price too high could result in fewer bookings, while setting it too low might lead to lower revenue than your property can achieve.

How to Get the Base Price Right:

  1. Use PriceLabs’ Base Price Help Tool: This tool analyzes historical trends and market data to suggest an optimal starting point for your listing.
  2. Consider Your Unique Property: Factor in your property’s amenities, location, and booking history. If your property has unique features, you might be able to set a higher base price. Please note that if a common amenity is offered by the majority of properties—like hot tub access in ski markets or cabins with an arcade game—it will be factored into the market based base price.
  3. Test and Iterate: Don’t be afraid to experiment. If you’re not seeing the bookings you expected, adjust the base price by small margins (e.g., 5%) and monitor the impact on your occupancy and revenue.

Start with Performance Metrics: Your First Checkpoint

Performance metrics are the backbone of assessing your listing’s health. This should be your first point of reference when optimizing any aspect of your listings. Here's how to find and use them effectively:

Where to Find Performance Metrics:

  • Navigate to the Pricing Dashboard or Multi-Calendar.

  • Click “Add Metrics” to see detailed performance data on your listings.

  • These metrics update once a day and give a real-time snapshot of how your listings are doing.

Key Metrics to Focus On:

      1. Occupancy:

    1. Definition: The percentage of days your listing is booked.
    2. Actionable Tip: If your occupancy is lower than the market average, consider reducing your base price or using the “Aggressive” profile under the occupancy based adjustments. If your occupancy is high but revenue is low, your prices may be too low, in which case you can consider increasing your base price

      2. Minimum Price Hitting Dates:

    1. Definition: The percentage of available dates when the rate is set at your minimum price.
    2. Actionable Tip: If too many dates are hitting your minimum price, it’s time to review your base and minimum prices. Consider decreasing your minimum price to give the algorithm enough room to adjust for the low demand dates. Also, keeping your price at the minimum for an extended period can negatively impact your visibility on OTAs.

      3. ADR (Average Daily Rate):

    1. Definition: The average revenue earned per booked night.
    2. Actionable Tip: If your ADR is lower than expected, consider revisiting your base price and your minimum price. You can consider increasing both these prices.

What If You’re Not Seeing Enough Bookings?

If you’re not getting the bookings you expected, it’s essential to adjust quickly. Here’s a practical approach to get your listings back on track:

Troubleshooting Low Bookings

Occupancy Troubles:

    1. How to check: The very first checkpoint is to see if it’s just your listing or the overall market that’s not getting bookings. If it’s just your listing, you should check your prices compared to the market. The “Future Prices Chart” section in the Neighborhood Data Tab allows you to compare your prices against your competitors so you can find out if your prices are too high or too low for your market.

    1. Actionable Tip: If your prices are too high, you should revisit your base price, and lower it to get to competitive rates. If occupancy is significantly lower than the market, consider using PriceLabs' “Aggressive” Occupancy profile to increase the discounts and capture bookings for gaps in your calendar. As your listing sees better occupancy, the discounts will start decreasing per the profile.

  1. Monitor Booking Trends: Use the Portfolio Analytics Pacing Chart to see how your current booking pace compares to previous years. Sometimes, lower booking activity might be due to seasonality, and your pacing data can help confirm whether it’s typical for this time of year.
  1. Check Pricing Against Historical Rates: Head over to the Neighborhood Data Tab to review how your current price compares to previous periods. If your current rates are significantly higher than before - it could be a red flag. In this case, consider lowering your base price to be more competitive in the market and attract more bookings.

Review Booking Windows:

    1. How to check: You can use the “Occupancy Chart” section in the Neighborhood data tab. It shows you the dates that your listing has been booked against the market occupancy percentage. This will help you identify if your listing is not getting booked on higher demand dates or if your listing is getting booked too early even on low demand dates.

    1. Actionable Tip: For high-demand dates where you're underperforming compared to the market, lower your minimum stays or lower your base price to capture more bookings. If you're getting booked too early on low-demand dates, consider raising your base price or increasing your far-out minimum stay requirements to avoid those short bookings. You can review PriceLabs minimum stay recommendations to make sure you’re getting the right balance of revenue and occupancy.

Review Your Listing’s Visibility:

          Sometimes, a drop in bookings isn't due to pricing alone but also your listing's visibility.
    1. Check Platform Visibility: On platforms like Airbnb, listings can drop in search rankings if they aren’t updated frequently. Refresh your listing details or adjust your calendar to improve visibility.
    2. Increase Engagement: Respond quickly to guest inquiries and maintain excellent reviews to boost your ranking in search results.

Sync Check:

    1. How to check: Make sure that your listings are syncing by checking the “Last Synced” status of your listing.

    2. Actionable Tip: If you encounter sync errors, please reach out to support@pricelabs.co to help resolve those.

What If You’re Seeing Too Many Bookings?

At PriceLabs, we know it can be thrilling to see your calendar filling up quickly after completing your free trial. However, a high volume of bookings might be a sign that your rates are too low, and you could be missing opportunities to maximize revenue. Here’s how you can leverage PriceLabs to adjust your pricing and maintain a healthy balance between occupancy and profitability.

Increase Your Base Price Using PriceLabs’ Recommendations

If you’re seeing a lot of bookings, especially far in advance, it’s time to reconsider your base price.

  1. Gradually Raise the Base Price: Using our pricing dashboard, adjust your base price upward in small increments (5-10%). This way, you can test how demand reacts to the price increase without risking a drastic drop in bookings.
  2. Monitor the Impact: With performance metrics and neighborhood data, you can track how changes to your base price affect future bookings, making it easy to fine-tune your pricing strategy.

Optimize Your Minimum Stay Settings

Too many bookings might mean higher operational costs due to frequent turnovers.

  1. Increase Minimum Stay Requirements for far-out dates: You can use PriceLabs to implement different minimum stay rules depending on how far out the booking is. For example, increase the minimum stay requirement for far-out bookings to secure longer reservations. You should check the PriceLabs recommended minimum stays which are tailored for your listing.
  2. Decrease Minimum Stay Requirements for last-minute dates: Securing longer last-minute bookings can be challenging. To boost occupancy for any remaining dates, consider reducing your minimum stay requirements for last-minute availability. This will make it easier to fill those gaps and avoid leaving dates unbooked.
  3. Tailor Minimum Stays by Season: Use the PriceLabs’ Min Stay Profiles to set higher minimum stays during peak seasons or weekends when demand is naturally higher, reducing the number of short stays and maximizing your profits.

Stay Informed with Notifications and Alerts

Stay proactive by keeping an eye on PriceLabs notifications and alerts. These include important information about recommended base prices and minimum prices, and sync errors.

  • Price Recommendations:

    1. Actionable Tip: Regularly review recommendations from the bell icon on your dashboard. These help you stay competitive in changing markets.
    2. Base Price Nudge: If your base price deviates more than 5% from our recommendations, we’ll notify you.
    3. Min Price Nudge: If at least 21 days are stuck at your minimum price for over 10 days, consider reducing it.

  • Events:

    1. Check for newly announced events and make sure your pricing reflects those changes. If not, report them to ensure your prices are optimized for high-demand dates. You can check Events for more information.

  • Sync Errors:

    1. Actionable Tip: Sync errors happen occasionally, You can try reconnecting your listings or contact support if the errors still persist.

Expand Your Knowledge: Portfolio Analytics for In-Depth Insights

For a deeper dive into your performance, use Portfolio Analytics to track trends over time and compare your pre-PriceLabs performance to the present.

  1. Actionable Tip: Set quarterly goals for metrics like Revenue, RevPAR, and Occupancy. Regularly review these reports to ensure your pricing strategy is aligned with your goals.

Final Tips for Long-Term Success

Even after you’ve stabilized your listings, keep optimizing. Your market will change over time, and staying agile is key.

  1. Regular Reviews: Even after the first 30 days, review your listings at least bi-weekly. Compare your performance against similar listings to stay competitive.
  2. Keep Learning: Join PriceLabs training webinars or read our blog to stay updated on new features and strategies.
  3. Reach Out for Support: If you’re still facing challenges, don’t hesitate to contact PriceLabs support for personalized assistance. Our team can help tailor your pricing strategy for optimal performance.