Unit 1 · Foundations of Revenue Management · Lesson 1.5
The concept of a comp set
A comp set is the small selection of competing listings most relevant to yours, chosen from the guest’s perspective rather than the owner’s. Benchmarking against it beats benchmarking against the broader market, because it compares apples with apples: same location, same sleeps, same calibre of stay, the listings your guest would genuinely book instead.
The full lesson text below is an edited transcript of the video, published 2026-08-24. The complete course is free at the playbook.
Why a comp set beats market data
Everything in revenue management, from the definitions to the performance measures, applies to every other operator in your market just as it applies to you. What separates good decisions from gut feel is data, and data becomes valuable in proportion to how relevant it is to your specific situation. That is the entire point of a comp set: a selection of the competing listings most relevant to yours, so that benchmarking and performance tracking compare apples with apples instead of with the whole orchard.
Take a four-bedroom beachfront house with a jacuzzi on Long Beach Island, New Jersey. Comparing it with every listing worldwide is obviously useless. All listings on the island is still too wide: a one-bedroom apartment attracts a different guest, different nightly rates, different lengths of stay and different booking lead times than a six-bedroom house. Narrow it to four-bedroom beachfront houses, and sharper still to those with a pool or jacuzzi, and now the data you collect describes your actual competition.
Build it from the guest’s perspective, not yours
The one rule that governs comp set construction: it is about the guest’s perspective. Scan the other listings in your market and ask one question of each: is this a listing my guests would consider instead of mine, or at least as a viable alternative?
What you do not care about at this stage is what competitors charge or earn. You do not know their situation: whether they own outright, carry a mortgage, run an arbitrage, or price as a hobby. None of it matters, because none of it is visible to the guest. A guest cares about the experience on offer, nothing else.
The scan usually starts with location, then location inside the location: near the ski lifts, the restaurants, the beach. Then the listing itself: bedrooms and bed types, the size of the spaces, outdoor areas, views. Then amenities weighted by trip type: a hairdryer is irrelevant on holiday, a dedicated workspace is decisive for business travel. Then the surround: reviews compared with yours, cancellation policies, whether booking is instant or gated behind an inquiry. Anything a guest could weigh when choosing between you and them belongs in the comparison.
Price is deliberately absent from that list. Similar listings attract similar price points on their own, and pricing is what the strategy is for. When building the set, stay in the guest’s shoes.
When there is no perfect comp set
Sometimes the market simply does not contain listings like yours. If you run the only two-bedroom home in the area, you widen to other bedroom categories. If every candidate has a pool and yours does not, you work with what exists. The purpose of the set is the decisions it informs, and even the only treehouse in a sea of apartments shares denominators with its market: booking lead times, lengths of stay, cancellation behaviour.
Remember too that your connection to the listing is not your guest’s. A house one block from the beach may book almost identically to one on the sand in a summer that sells out anyway. The artwork you love, the designer furniture, the branded cutlery: if guests do not see the value, they will not pay a premium for it. Aim for a workable set rather than a perfect one; the rates you then set will tell you soon enough whether the benchmark was close.
And if you are genuinely the outlier, the only luxury listing among standard ones, expect to sit above the market, and the reverse holds too. The set explains your position; it does not dictate it.
Train like a professional athlete
One mindset closes this out. Professional athletes do not fixate on the competition; they focus on their own performance and its improvement over time. They define their goals, go to work, and let the process compound.
Your version of that: whether your listing prices at the middle of the market, the top, or the bottom matters less than whether you hit your own revenue goals. Over time you learn your own lead times, lengths of stay and rates, you get to know your true competitors, and the comp set stops being a construction exercise and becomes something you simply know. It is a starting point and a bonus, not a verdict.