We bring another article in our ongoing series to understand the experience of folks from team PriceLabs who use the platform to manage their properties. This team comprises property owners, managers, revenue managers, and hosts.
We explore various aspects of the vacation rental industry and understand how PriceLabs can be a pivotal addition to your tech stack. We believe that PriceLabs, a data-driven revenue management software, can add to your vacation rental property’s pricing strategy.
In this edition, we spoke to Thibault Masson, a vacation rental property owner and industry analyst. He owns two properties – one in St. Barths and another in Bali. We asked for his feedback on how PriceLabs helped him in his vacation rental journey.
Tips from Thibault, a vacation rental expert
What should new users do when they sign up for PriceLabs?
- Go to Market Dashboard and research your local market
- Sign up for the trial and let the algorithm work
- Set up your Base Price and Minimum Stay Restrictions
- Keep an eye on Portfolio Analytics to understand how your portfolio is performing
- Attend PriceLabs training webinars to understand the software further
Pricelabs Portfolio Analytics includes a real-time reporting system that tracks your property’s important financial metrics, providing quick insights into its performance. With deeper analysis at the listing level, you can use our data to make informed decisions when setting your pricing strategy.
Features that Thibault swears by:
Base Price
Thibault says it is necessary to update your Base Price at least once a quarter according to the market.
Customizations
PriceLabs Customizations provide the control you need to apply your market knowledge for a data-driven automated pricing strategy.
Dynamic Minimum Stay Restrictions
These restrictions help you control the booking length while also dynamically pricing your property for each type of booking.
About Thibault Masson
Thibault Masson has been with PriceLabs for nearly a year as the Head of Product Marketing. He is also the founder of Rental Scale-Up, a short-term rental news site. The site is now a part of PriceLabs.
He currently owns properties in two different locations – St. Barths and Bali. He owns two properties in St. Barths: Maison Domingue and Villa BelAmour.
Maison Domingue is a designer luxury villa for up to 6 guests. Villa Domingue is located in the quiet, private, and upscale area of Pointe Milou, on the Caribbean island of Saint Barthélemy (a.k.a. St. Barths), French West Indies. Nestled atop a cliff, Domingue is the quintessential vacation rental for friends and families who value privacy. The cliffside swimming pool and sundecks provide unforgettable, romantic views of the Caribbean Sea at sunset.
Villa BelAmour is a romantic villa for 2 with stunning views. The villa is also in Pointe Milou. It has a cliffside swimming pool and provides the complete privacy required to unwind and relax during a vacation.
In Bali, he owns Bulung Daya – a luxury hideaway villa with an Indonesian twist. It has 2 main guest houses and several service and entertainment spaces. Bulung Daya is located away from the hectic pace and crowded streets of modern Bali that you can see in Kuta.
He started using PriceLabs nearly 4 years ago to manage pricing for his properties as a property owner. He has listed them on Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com through the PMS BookingSync. The properties are also available for direct bookings through their respective websites.
Before using PriceLabs, Thibault dedicated every Monday to updating his prices on his websites and PMS – BookingSync. He used to manually update prices on Excel using a complicated set of functions to lower prices for each week as the stay date got closer. This was a way to attract last-minute bookings. After updating prices on Excel, he updated prices manually in the PMS. This took up 2 hours every week.
Having been in the vacation rental industry for a while, Thibault understood the need for an accurate pricing strategy. However, manually keeping up with market trends and booking patterns is not feasible as it leads to an improper pricing strategy.
This is where PriceLabs helped Thibault. He now monitors his pricing strategy once a week on PriceLabs, accurately pricing his rental properties without requiring much manual intervention.
PriceLabs helped with Market Research
As a vacation rental and short-term rental industry analyst, Thibault has had to research market data and create conclusions to guide his readers to best practices. Rental Scale-up provides actionable insights that vacation rental and short-term rental business owners and industry professionals can use to improve guest experience, optimize occupancy and increase revenue.
PriceLabs’ Market Dashboards helped him find historical and future predictions and specific regional data about the market’s performance. He says PriceLabs helped him with ‘fresh real-time data’ that helped him understand and create actionable insights for his articles, webinars, and more.
To property managers and owners, Thibault recommends using PriceLabs’ Market Dashboard and Neighborhood Data to gain valuable insights into the market and property pricing. They can use this data to make informed decisions on where to invest their money and evaluate the effectiveness of their past investments in terms of vacation rentals. Property managers can also use this information to support their revenue management strategies and demonstrate the performance of the properties they manage to their clients; the property owners.
A data-driven automated pricing strategy helped him earn more during peak season
Bali is a popular vacation destination with year-round events. The high season in St. Barths traditionally ends in mid-April. However, the esteemed Les Voiles de Saint Barth sailing regatta occurs each year in the second half of April. With PriceLabs, Thibault examined demand graphs and identified the substantial demand potential during the event. With the data provided by PriceLabs, Thibault decided to break away from the conventional pricing structure during the event used by property owners and adapted flexible and adaptive pricing strategies.
When Thibault signed up for PriceLabs, he realized he was pricing his properties much lower than their potential. PriceLabs algorithm priced them higher, and he got bookings for a price he never imagined. PriceLabs’ data-driven price recommendations helped him optimize occupancy and increase revenue for low and high seasons.
PriceLabs helped him understand his market and optimize stay length
Before using PriceLabs, Thibault had a blanket minimum stay set up which would lead to orphan gaps. He was unaware of the concept of orphan gaps and did not know that PriceLabs could help him solve this issue in a way he liked. With PriceLabs, he could research and understand his market better and set up dynamic Minimum Stay Restrictions. This led to optimizing his stay length and increasing his occupancy, RevPAR, and revenue.
Fun fact: When he started using PriceLabs to manage pricing for his properties, he also signed up for the training sessions. He realized he wasn’t using minimum stays efficiently during our onboarding training. He says that our training sessions were extremely helpful in understanding the software. Thibault suggests that setting up the Base Price and Minimum Stay Restrictions should be non-negotiable.
PriceLabs’ Knowledge Base gave him a wealth of information about the software and set him up for success as a property owner.
Better integration with BookingSync
Thibault has listed his properties on multiple channels and used a PMS – BookingSync, to manage his properties. He was also accepting direct bookings via the websites for each property. It was necessary for the revenue management software he was to choose to integrate with his PMS for pricing his properties.
This was where PriceLabs came in! PriceLabs integrates directly with over 90 Channel Managers and PMSs.
If you use a specific channel manager, PMS, or OTA and cannot find it in our list of platforms we integrate with, contact us at support@pricelabs.co, and we’ll start the conversation for an integration.
Conclusion
How did PriceLabs help Thibault, a vacation rental property owner and industry analyst?
- PriceLabs gave him 2 hours a week back by automating revenue management
- PriceLabs helped with Market Research
- Using a data-driven automated pricing strategy helped him earn more during peak season.
- PriceLabs helped him understand his market and optimize stay length.
- Better integration with BookingSync
Features that he swears by
- Base Price: He says it is necessary to update your base price at least once a quarter according to the market
- Customizations: PriceLabs Customizations provide you with the control you need to apply your market knowledge to our data-driven automated pricing strategy.
- Dynamic Minimum Stay Restrictions: These restrictions help you control the booking length while also dynamically pricing your property for each type of booking.
