Revenue management, answered
Straight answers for vacation rental managers.
The questions managers actually ask about pricing their portfolios, answered plainly by Jack Murphy, our head of revenue management since 2017.
What is RevPAR and why does it matter for vacation rental managers?
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How do you stop property owners from leaving your vacation rental management company?
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Should a vacation rental manager use dynamic pricing or set prices manually?
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How do you price vacation rentals for shoulder season?
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What is a comp set in vacation rental revenue management?
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How much more revenue can professional revenue management add to a vacation rental?
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What are orphan nights and how should vacation rental managers price them?
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How should vacation rental managers set minimum stay rules?
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What should a vacation rental manager show owners in a monthly report?
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How do you benchmark a vacation rental against its real competition?
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What is the difference between occupancy and RevPAR for short-term rentals?
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How often should vacation rental prices be adjusted?
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How do vacation rental revenue managers charge for their service?
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How should a vacation rental manager set the base price for a new listing?
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Is a revenue management service worth it for a vacation rental manager?
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How do you handle a last-minute cancellation on a vacation rental?
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When the market softens for several weeks, should I lower my minimum nightly prices temporarily or hold them higher to protect my average rate?
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Do seasonal and external market conditions actually affect how my listings perform, or can pricing be managed around them?
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How quickly should I expect a pricing overhaul to improve my booking performance?
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What minimum nightly price should I set for a slow-season market without killing bookings?
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When a listing keeps underperforming, how do I keep from losing the owner whose property it is?
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How do I stop losing owner-clients when their listings underperform on bookings?
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Is my revenue underperformance the actual reason owners are leaving me, or is it something else?
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How do I find better property-owner clients and win higher-quality listings for my portfolio?
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How do I build a predictable pipeline of new owner deals instead of relying on cold outreach?
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How do I compete with the big corporate managers in my market for new owner clients?
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How do I move away from low-fee owners who demand constant hand-holding toward higher-paying, lower-maintenance clients?
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How do I reduce the manual workload of optimizing each listing so I get leverage instead of more labor?
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If I switch pricing providers, will there be downtime, or can pricing start the same day I move off my current setup?
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Should the single-night-stay rule that fills one-night gaps be turned on across my whole portfolio or only on specific listings?
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What assumptions and methodology sit behind a revenue projection, and how do I explain them to my own property owner?
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What revenue increase can I realistically expect, and can you show me the projected numbers before I commit?
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Are projected revenue figures guaranteed, or could the market change and move them?
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How is each of my properties performing versus the comparable listings competing for the same guests in my market?
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What is the proof of the revenue actually captured for my portfolio, listing by listing, since pricing was taken over?
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Why are my listings priced above the market median during a slow month instead of priced to book?
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When my occupancy is low, shouldn't I just drop rates to fill the calendar?
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Why aren't we dropping prices faster instead of inching them down gradually?
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Can I get white-label monthly performance reports I can send to my owners under my own brand to keep them loyal to me?
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A property booked right after a price drop, so doesn't that prove the lower price is the right strategy?
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Can I raise the rate on a specific property given its strong recent booking values?
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Can I hold prices higher on a listing because the owner cares most about achieving a high rate?
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How do I stop one-night orphan gaps in the calendar between bookings?
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Should I change a listing to a new owner or account, or refresh it, to boost its search ranking?
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What is the right comp set for a property, and should I edit the existing one or build a new one?
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Is the market and comp-set radius being used the right reference market for my area when property quality varies a lot across it?
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How does the comp set or percentile benchmark actually get used to set my prices?
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What should the minimum nightly price and minimum-stay rules be for a given property?
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Can you look at my conversion or view-to-booking metrics to explain soft performance?
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Am I leaving money on the table because of a lack of pricing sophistication and strategy?
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Can we set a hard minimum price floor on a listing so it never books below a certain number?
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Can I restrict which days guests are allowed to check in or check out?
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What is the downside of adding more minimum-stay and check-out restrictions to a calendar?
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How should pricing be handled differently for mid-term or long-term rentals versus short-term?
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Why is a listing getting so many short minimum-night stays, and can I enforce a higher minimum stay?
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Can a specific listing be taken off dynamic pricing because we are running it mostly long-term?
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Do long-term and mid-term stays hurt my momentum and ranking on the main booking channel?
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Why did a particular date get priced so low, and can it be corrected?
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How do I explain to a skeptical property owner why their nightly rates are lower than they expect?
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What data can I use to justify a conservative pricing approach to an owner who wants higher rates?
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Are my booked rates actually higher than last year, or am I leaving money on the table?
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Once you adjust for changes in the overall market, am I actually doing better than last year?
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Why is a newer or slow-booking listing not picking up, and what should we do about it?
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How should I price a brand-new listing with no booking history so it gains traction instead of sitting empty?
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Could a minimum-stay or pricing setting have been overwritten when the pricing tool synced with my property management system?
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How do I connect a listing from a non-Airbnb booking channel into the pricing platform?
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Is a sudden booking drop caused by new pricing, or by something broken in my PMS integration?
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Why are my nightly rates showing much higher on the booking channel than they appear in the pricing tool?
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How do I bring my channel markup back down to the standard percentage instead of an inflated one?
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Why do prices sync to some of my listings but not others that revert to my PMS seasonal rules?
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When the pricing tool shows a price, is that my owner's net payout or the amount before the platform fee?
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Why did a recent booking produce an owner payout far lower than expected, and was that price correct?
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If one of my listings has a pricing problem, does it affect all my listings or just that one property?
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Why am I only getting last-minute bookings inside a zero-to-seven-day window and almost nothing booked further out?
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How do I get more far-out, advance bookings on the calendar instead of only short-notice ones?
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How do I price a listing so a new one keeps its position in the OTA search ranking?
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Can I keep length-of-stay discount pricing active alongside dynamic nightly pricing?
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Should I keep my listings priced below market to protect momentum and my OTA position?
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When a guest cancels close to the date, how should I re-price the freed-up nights to rebook them?
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Should two competing listings of different sizes in the same building be priced relative to each other, or independently?
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How far out and how aggressively should I drop weekend and last-minute rates during the slow season to keep occupancy?
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Should I combine multiple similar units under one listing or price each one individually?
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How do I make sure my pricing ladders correctly so a 3-bedroom prices above a 2-bedroom and the 2-bedroom above the 1-bedroom?
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Should a combined or compound listing be priced at a discount to its individual rooms, or should I price each independently first to set a baseline?
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Should owned-but-currently-unmanaged listings be added into the priced portfolio or kept priced manually?
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When a short-term-rental platform moves to a host-only fee structure, what markup do I add in the channel manager so the owner's net payout stays the same?
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When I raise rates after adding a new value proposition, should I push the increase all at once or roll it in gradually?
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How should I re-price cancellations and reopened dates so I capture more revenue on the refilled nights?
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How does day-of-week pricing affect longer stays, and can a mid-tier weekday rate make a multi-night booking too expensive at the total-cost level?
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Am I getting enough extra revenue back to justify what I pay for revenue management each month?
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Should I just learn revenue management myself and bring it in-house as I scale?
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How do I know the pricing is being actively managed by a human expert rather than left to a set-and-forget algorithm?
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How do I make sure an owner-negotiated or manually set rate doesn't get overridden in the background without me knowing?
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Should I price a multi-listing property to stay on short-term rental, or convert a poorly performing unit to a long-term rental instead?
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When I add a new listing, will it automatically be priced and onboarded, and how is it billed?
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Can I get a 12-month look-back and forward-pacing revenue report I can use to win a new owner's business?
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When an owner is selling a property, how should I handle blocked dates for inspections and the risk to existing reservations?
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How do I price a minimum-fee revenue-management offer to convince hesitant self-managing owners to let me run their pricing?
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Can you pull a report on a prospective owner's listings so I can show them the revenue problem and win their account?
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How do other managers mark up a revenue-management service when they resell it to their owners?
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Why are my listings booking far below the minimum nightly price I set?
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