Beyond launches search-powered pricing and insights

US: Beyond, a revenue management solution for vacation rental managers and owners, has launched a new capability to collect, analyse and automate actions using real-time consumer search data for the short-term vacation rental industry.

The data, collected by Beyond’s Beacon plug-in, feeds into the company’s advanced Insights Pro and Pricing Pro offerings and users with visibility into what consumers are searching for, as well as automatically adjusting pricing based on consumer searches rather than having to wait to see trends based on previous bookings. According to Beyond, early adopters of the Pro features see nine per cent higher RevPAN [Revenue per Available Listing] versus those not utilising the Pro features. 

Beyond founder and CTO, David Kelso, said: “Beyond pioneered dynamic pricing for the vacation rental industry using future occupancy, historical trends, and booking pacing. But consumers are reacting faster than ever to newly announced events, snapping up underpriced units before managers can react. And managers can’t always rely on their competitors being underpriced to help them identify peak demand.

“We built our Beacon capability to ensure that our users are incorporating all possible data and insights into their revenue strategies so they can understand what types of short-term rentals consumers are searching for in their region and adjust their pricing and marketing strategies accordingly,” he added.

Daniel Landis, general manager at Kauai Kahuna Vacation Rentals, said: “Adding search data into our revenue management is such a game changer. Early data about what people are searching for showed us that we could be charging substantially more per night for units that have air conditioning, which is intuitive, but hard data is a better decision-making tool than intuition. 

“We can quantify the potential revenue increase, and now we’re focused on using these insights to talk with owners who have been on the fence about installing air conditioning, and we have the data to support why they should do it. I love that this new data set is helping us not only price even more specifically, but it’s going to improve the relationships we have with our owners because we’ll be able to show them how long guests want to stay, what amenities they want, and more,” he added.

Pricing Pro

Beyond’s enhanced dynamic pricing solutions incorporate consumer search data into a pricing algorithm, so it can automatically increase or decrease rates based on demand for that night in order to capture the most bookings. Property managers with the  enhanced solution can:

• Avoid sacrificial units because Beyond’s algorithm will capture spikes in consumer demand in real-time, and increase prices accordingly
• React quickly to events in their market, and advise owners on why prices are increasing or decreasing, thereby avoiding reactive owner conversations
• Avoid low bookings due to too high prices when there is low demand for a particular date or day of the week

Insights Pro

The visualisation of the consumer search data is powered within Beyond’s new Insights Pro offering, along with improved Comp Sets. This enables users to make data-driven decisions and recommendations to owners that will directly impact their bottom line, such as ad spend optimisation, property investments that will give them the most “bang for their buck”, pricing and customisation adjustments, and website improvements. 

The data unlocks key information for property managers such as how many visitors convert to paid guests, where guests are searching from, what they are searching for, and when they are searching. With it, property managers can:

• Immediately identify if a new event is happening in their area and adjust prices accordingly
• Identify if consumers are looking at their website but not converting to paid guests
• Understand what types of vacation rental listings consumers are searching for in your area – such as pet friendly options, properties with hot tubs, two-bedroom vs five-bedroom, three-nights vs a week, etc.
• Uncover where their potential guests are searching from so they can target your marketing spend
• Understand how other listings in their market are performing, their pricing and how fast they are booking via OTAs, including crucial data, such as health score, base price and occupancy
• Save time [and money] with the ability to view, edit and save different listings in their market
• Understand how the market is performing at all times, without needing to manually maintain the data, via automatically updated dashboards 

Since “pioneering” dynamic pricing for the short-term rental market in 2013, Beyond says that it has supported over 350,000 properties in more than 15,000 locations worldwide.