I’m honestly willing to be convinced. Your site says that you can increase my income by 40% and of course that interests me.
But it is 2017 and I’d expect your website to be able to convince me rather than a phone call. That’s all. 
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haha - Wheelhouse is just a rip-off of Beyond Pricing. Beyond Pricing is still the only company with actual revenue management experience and it shows in our ability to identify major events and the 60,000+ listings currently using us. As the last comment notes, they just get a feed from PredictHQ of all events, no matter how irrelevant to short term rental demand.
I am a paying Beyond pricing user. I looked into Wheelhouse, one thing I like about it is they have suggest base price. That helps a lot. Anyway beyond pricing can come out same ideas?
I was willing to set up a free trial with wheelhouse, but since I’m in a suburb of St Louis, MO I guess I’m out of market area. Even though I’m minutes from an international airport. Oh well.
@jaquo, on the plus side you get 10 free bookings before you have to add a credit card to continue service. I was looking forward to their suggested base price tool.
We use the Health Score to help guide you whether to increase or decrease your Base Price. We’ve found that to be much more accurate. If you remember when Airbnb used to suggest a Base Price, they would just take the average around you, but every place is so different. You can always just go to your Market Data tab on Beyond Pricing to see the average.
Yes, taking the average is bad. However, you can determine the base price and adjust it automatically based on the health score.
I’d love BP to add events tracking and impact prediction to its pricing formula.
I’ve found neither to be be particularly good, at least for the Toronto market. Both are useful guides, but I would never blindly follow either one as no model will ever be as good as a well-informed human.
Beyond Pricing simply uses a user defined base price + a seasonal factor + a day of week factor. It has almost no event data anymore (it misses holiday weekends, major events, concerts, sports, etc.) and doesn’t seem to look at booking levels or hotel comparables. Also the day of the week factor is so small that prices are mostly flat over the course of a week and it massively underprices weekends as a result.
Wheelhouse has a more sophisticated model that reflects nearby hotel and top host prices and also looks at how many listings are available at a given time, so it tends to reflect the variability of demand more accurately. However, it still tends to overprice off-peak days (where there’s a glut of units available and stiff competition from hotels) and underprice during high demand periods because it doesn’t recognize what’s going on in the market.
For example, we have Pride coming up near the end of June which is a huge weekend for tourism. Popular Airbnbs are getting snapped up already, but Beyond Pricing is completely clueless because the event isn’t in their system. Wheelhouse is a little better because it sees that fewer listings than usual are available and hotel price are higher than usual, but it still underprices because host prices haven’t increased much (because most hosts don’t raise prices during big events). I manually set my price at about 30% or $90 more than the Wheelhouse recommendation, yet still got a booking three months ahead of the event which to me says I was not asking enough. If I had followed the Wheelhouse recommendation I would have been out about $250 for four days, and even moreso for Beyond Pricing. Meanwhile I have large weekday chunks available in April asking less than either service recommends because the demand just isn’t there at the prices they suggest.
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Did you tried pricelabs?
It’s the only one for our market that is available
I had not, but thanks for the tip! It seems like a bit of a black box, but at least it seems in the ballpark. Some of the price swings are massive! When actual booked rates can double within a month, it’s no wonder that the pricing suggestions are all over the place. I feel more lost now than when I started…
Hey @cooperjto thanks for the kind-ish words! 
You bring up some really valid points. Let me go into a bit more detail as to how our Ph.D Data Scientists generate recommendations. Our prices may be seemingly low during what is perceived to be high-demand dates because our model is reactive more to observed booked prices than it is to compressed availability. What we’ve observed over time is that low availability does not always imply high demand. This is very true for urban markets where number of available units drastically change day over day.
For Pride coming up in Toronto, we are observing higher-than-average listed prices – which is one of the ways we can detect the event – but bookings have not yet caught up. We see bookings happening, but they are still at average prices, which is why our recommendations haven’t gone significantly up yet.
And lastly, if you still don’t believe our pricing recommendations for any particular event during the year, you can always override our pricing and set a custom rate (which we won’t charge you for ).
We love talking about this stuff – and learning how we can best help hosts – so feel free to hit us up at hello@usewheelhouse.com at any time too.
Any company that comes on a host forum and bigs themselves at the expense of their competitors, sounding like a child in the playground, isn’t one I want to do business with . Major fail @ianmchenry
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Wheelhouse: Works great. Well designed. Great Customer Support and good User Interface. If you want more control than AirBnB smart pricing offers, this is the way to go. This is what I use. So far, I’m thrilled with them. For me, having additional control, additional information means that I can earn more money. The site makes it very clear how it’s computing the price and gives you friendly controls for making adjustments. It also lists what events are in your area (which is something I’ve always wanted). They take 1%, which for me is absolutely worth it.
Airbnb Smart Pricing: This used to suck and almost universally give prices that were too low. These days it’s not too bad. It tends to emphasize very consistent pricing for bookings that are more than a few weeks out. In my view, that means it sacrifices my potential earnings. But if you don’t want to have to think too hard, this is a perfectly respectable and practical way to go.
Beyond Pricing: They have really great blog posts. But otherwise I did not find them useful. They never replied to any of my emails pointing out notable problems with the site. They have an odd concept of “health” for a listing which from what I can tell is only useful if you want to always be booked solid, all the time, though airbnb. They were the first site to offer more aggressive pricing (which is good), but from my perspective their approach was not reality based. Their math is not transparent, which is a big deal for me. I used them for a while before I fully lost faith. You’re better off just using Airbnb Smart Pricing. Or if you want detailed control, use Wheelhouse.
I am using pricelabs (cheaper and only one available in my place) and happy with it.
My Airbnb smart tips went crazy (same as Smart Pricing). I called airbnb and talked to them. They insisted that it was working perfectly, even though it was clearly wrong. I no longer trust Airbnb smart pricing, and I’m very glad I had switched over to Wheelhouse before this happened.
I believe that I know my area well. But manually changing prices based on all of the different factors and daily fluctuations is a crazy amount of work and is just not realist. An automated system (if done right) is better than a person. I’ve lost faith in both Airbnb Smart Pricing and Beyondpricing. Wheelhouse has been earning me more money. Playing hard ball with pricing means a few more cancellations and more haggling. The calendar fills up more slowly. But I’m now getting notably more per night than when I was with airbnb smart pricing or doing my pricing manually. Airbnb wants to be overly nice to the customers. Also, recently, their price tip system went downright crazy for me. And talking to airbnb support didn’t help. In short, Wheelhouse is helping me to earn more money.
I switched to Wheelhouse for about 3 months and HATED IT. The platform is super clunky, you have to hit ‘save’ after any modification to your pricing or you need to start over. I created custom prices at least 5 times, and every single time they disappeared! I’m just VERY lucky someone didn’t IB with Wheelhouses recommended prices for Coachella weekend or I would have been out $10k. Also, when I emailed CS about it, the only response was we will look into it, which is nice but I’m not willing to risk $10k that your engineers fix the problem ASAP.
They have some very cool ‘extras’ like seasonality adjustments, telling you what event is driving up prices, custom price drops for close in bookings, and actually giving you recommended base pricing, where Beyond Pricing doesn’t give you recommendations you create the price yourself. So, basically go to WheelHouse, find the recommended base price, then put it in Beyond Pricing.
If you have crazy events in your market like we do, you will have to manually enter the price for those days, bc neither BP or Wheelhouse seem to accurately predict the pricing. Using Coachella weekend for an example, BP and Wheelhouse think I should charge $1500ish per night, when I know (based on previous years) that I can get closer to $3500 per night.
Beyond Pricing isn’t as glitzy, but we have been using it for 18 months prior to trying Wheelhouse, and had ZERO issues. Thanks @ianmchenry, sorry I ever doubted you!
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Did you tried pricelabs?
I played around with it but for my markets the pricing was pretty off… I will look at it again, but right now after fighting with Wheelhouse for the bask 8 weeks, I’m going to go back to Beyond Pricing.
Beyond pricing is not adjusting the price during all holidays in my area, labor day, Thanksgiving, Christmas. I just got a booking on labor day weekend, last the opportunity. Makes me realize it so I had to manually adjusted Thanksgiving and Christmas.
I’m relatively new to Airbnb and started out on Beyond Pricing for about a month and was relatively happy with it until a booking inquiry for labor day weekend came in and I looked closer and realized how underpriced it was. This made me dig deeper and signed up with Wheelhouse to compare the pricing models and switched over after quickly noticing the pricing for labor day and a few others seemed more accurate.
I’ve been using Wheelhouse exclusively now for the past month and I’ve been really satisfied with the price modeling (based on a lot of manual market comps I do day-to-day to make sure it’s accurate) and higher booking rates I’ve been receiving. The biggest plus for me is the smart base rate adjustment that continually adjusts every 24 hours to take into account the latest booked rates you’ve received. It’s continually adjusted my base rate upwards from around $100 to now $115 without any vacancy falloff.
I’ve also had a few issues with the monthly charts not updating accurately and their customer support was super responsive and fixed the problem that was caused by new Airbnb data programming in 24 hours from when I alerted them to the issue. I also have a number of suggestions for improving the service that they’ve been responsive to.
There are still a few small features I prefer on Beyond Pricing like the ability to see the prices of your booked nights that are shaded differently than unbooked so you can still see them comparatively instead of the completely shaded out days that Wheelhouse uses. I’d also like to see Wheelhouse incorporate the lists of individual booked trips on a tab that are sorted both by latest trips and highest ADR trips that shows date booked, ADR and number of days in trip.
Also to add another big plus to Wheelhouse is their smoother price adjustments based on how many days away available dates are. BP allows you to punch in % price decrease based on how many days out from vacant day you are but Wheelhouse continually updates starting with a slight premium for days very far out and then slowly and smoothly starts adjusting down every 24 hours that you can customize differently than the standard 14 days out.
Lastly just to add that only a few weeks ago I noticed that Wheelhouse didn’t seem to discount single lone days steeply enough and I was left with my only vacant day this summer possibly because of this but since it seems to be dead on with its discounting for single isolated days as well as double and triple day blocks.
I get the sense that they are working really hard to add features and listen closely to their customers to bring on most asked for additions quickly.
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