Setting Up Beyond Pricing

We’ve been using Beyond Pricing for about a year and a half and it has been a game changer for us. Before going to Beyond Pricing we also looked at Wheelhouse and Pricinglabs.

All of the pricing tools basically do the same thing, but for different platforms. At the time we were looking at pricing tools, Beyond Pricing was the only option for our scenario and it has been fantastic!

Wheelhouse, Pricelabs and Beyond Pricing integrate with Airbnb but only Beyond Pricing integrates with VRBO. Since just about all our OTA bookings come from VRBO, Beyond Pricing was the only choice for us.

In this post I’ll go over setting up your listings with Beyond Pricing. We highly recommend using Beyond Pricing for dynamic pricing, but if for some reason you don’t want to use BP, please do yourself a favor and use another dynamic pricing tool.

An automatic pricing tool is a must. Not using one will cost you thousands in additional income.  

I would not recommend using the built-in tools for either VRBO or Airbnb. They have never been that great for us. VRBO’s Market Maker does give you a lot of data, but it just doesn’t compare to using a 3rd party dynamic pricing tool.

If you’ve already setup a Beyond Pricing account then you can skip to Step 3, that’s where we’ll go over setting up the pricing.

Step 1 – Create a BP account

Like I said, this part is pretty straight forward and Beyond Pricing does a good job of guiding you through the process.

Step 2 – Login and Link your Listings

On that page, click the listing you’d like to link to Beyond Pricing and you’ll be guided through the process.

Step 3 – The Meat And Potatoes – Setting Up Rates

This is where the good stuff starts. There are a bunch of settings you can adjust once you are comfortable using BP, but to get started there are four things you’ll need to figure out.

1- Minimum Price – What is the lowest price you’re willing to accept per night

2- Base Price – What is your average rate

3- Your booking window – How far ahead do you allow guests to book. Too far out and you may be missing out on getting a higher rate per night and too close and you’ll end up with more unbooked dates then you’d care for.

3- Your booking sweet spot – How far ahead would you like to have your calendar full. This is what we used to figure out our initial base rate.

The Minimum Price

This one isn’t too hard for most vacation rental hosts to come up with. The minimum price is your line in the sand that you are not willing to cross per night.

What number are you not willing to go below? That is your minimum price. You can do what we did at first, pad it a little to see what nightly rates BP generates for you.

You’ll most likely see the minimum price used in the shoulder months.

You’ll also see it used on the weekday rates if your property is in an area that’s primarily weekend bookings during the off-season.

The Base Price

This number is a whole lot trickier to come up with. In fact, I think this is the number that causes many to shy away from pulling the trigger on setting up dynamic pricing for their listing.

It feels daunting at first but don’t worry, none of this is set in stone. You can change this number as much or as little as you want.

The important thing is to pick a number, then you can adjust it later.

I’ll go over how we figured out our base price in the following section, but first I’d like to go over what the booking window is and the reasoning behind it.

If you can’t wait to see how we came up with our base price, you can skip to that section now.

The Booking Window

Beyond Pricing is able to set your listing’s pricing up to a year out.

I’ve heard many gurus recommend setting a 90-day booking window. Meaning guests will only be able to book their stay 90 days or less from check-in.

In fact, Beyond Pricing provides a rating of how well your property is performing based on that 90 day window. The more bookings you have further than 90 days away the lower your BP score will be.

The logic behind a smaller window is simple. There is a higher probability that many more houses are available for booking 6 months or a year out compared to 90 days out.

As the inventory of available houses dwindles the price for each house that is still available can be increased, based on supply and demand.

The theory sounds great, but we don’t subscribe to it. We personally set our booking window to a year out. The max that BP can set pricing for.

Here’s Why

We look at it a little differently. Of course, we want to maximize income but we’d also like to attract better guests.

In our experience, guests that plan out their vacations 6 -12 months ahead of time are more responsible and happier guests. Of course, there are exceptions but in our experience, that has been the case.

So, we’d rather get a booking from what is usually a more responsible guest, 6 – 12 months out rather than a guest that books 3 days before arrival which have a tendency of not being as responsible.

For us, it’s a balance of maximizing income and having great, responsible guests. Just make sure the prices you have that far out are high enough that you’ll be happy with the amount should you get a booking further out.

The Booking Sweet Spot

The way Beyond Pricing looks at it, to maximize your income, you should have openings less than 30 days away.

We don’t agree with that.

Actually, we do agree, in that it’ll maximize your nightly rate. But, there’s another ingredient to the booking sweet spot recipe that needs to be added.

Don’t get me wrong, We’re okay with getting a last-minute booking once and a while. However, if that was the norm, we feel we’d start getting the less than attractive guests (less responsible, more demanding, etc).

The sweet spot for us is 100% booked right around when the 30-day window starts. It won’t always be booked 100% 30 days out, but it’s what we aim for.

With that in mind here’s how we figured out our base rate.

Let’s Set Some Rates

Once you know your booking sweet spot, you can easily set your base price.

In our example we figured out we wanted our property to be 100% booked about 30 days out. That was our ideal situation.

So, when it came time to have BP set our rates for us (without breaking everything) we adjusted the base price until the rate BP sets at the 30 day window was similar to what our current, non-beyond pricing rates are.

Since the new beyond pricing rates for our booking window were similar to the rates we set before beyond pricing, it allowed us to start using beyond pricing without freaking out about the base price we chose.

We left it like that for a couple of weeks and then we steadily raised our base price.

That is how we got started with Beyond Pricing.

Setting the beyond pricing rates to match our existing rates in the booking window was like our training wheels for using their service. 

It’s funny, now that I have been using beyond pricing for well over a year, I don’t see what the big deal is. When we were first doing this though, we were really worried about doing the wrong thing.

I’m here to tell you, don’t worry about it. Just choose your base price and you can always change later.

How Often You Need To Update Rates

Again, this is something you can play with as much or as little as you want. Some people just love tinkering with the numbers constantly to find what works best.

Others are more of a set it and forget it approach.

We’re between the two, but lean toward the set it and forget it camp. For the most part we leave our rates alone and we use our booking window as our guide.

If we’re 100% booked before the booking window that tells us we need to raise our rates. If we feel there are an increasing number of days that are unbooked well within our booking sweet spot, then maybe we’d lower our rates.

With the unbooked dates in our booking sweet spot we manually override the prices for those dates and offer a discount.

We may have lowered our rates in the beginning because we were still nervous about the base number we chose. Once we got comfortable with the process we’ve only been raising rates. 🙂

As you start using Beyond Pricing you’ll have your own way of doing things, but the important thing is to start using a pricing tool.

You’re Done! Now get ready for more income!

I hope you found this post useful and that it motivates you to get started with Beyond Pricing! Seriously, no matter what size property you have, you will literally increase your income by the thousands of dollars. It has totally changed our business and I hope it does the same for you.

If you’re looking for other things you can do to increase your income, check out this post:

5 Ways To Increase Short Term Rental Income Today

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