Surge Price Predictor for Airbnb Hosts | Hacker News Reader

Surge Price Predictor for Airbnb Hosts

beyondstays.com

68 pointsdrm23726 comments

I can't fault Airbnb hosts if they use this -- if I was a host, I probably would. Nevertheless, it takes some of the charm and advantage out of it for us hostees. Airbnb seemed like a marketplace where sellers for the most part aren't trying to optimize their profits to squeeze out every last buck.

Edit: Actually, to be more accurate, it didn't feel like much of a "marketplace" at all, and that's where the charm was. You weren't terribly aware of supply and demand and the rest of econ 101 when using it.

Great point -- as we designed this, we thought a lot about how this might impact a marketplace/community (Airbnb) that we love.

In talking to a lot of hosts, as well as hosting ourselves, we've learned that (a) pricing your home is really hard, and (b) there is a LOT of work that goes into being a great host. From cleaning your home to welcoming guests and answering inquiries, (not to mention the cost of food, furniture, linens, etc.), most hosts spend hours every week making sure their guests are safe & happy.

If we can help hosts by making it easier to accurately price their home, we think we can create a bigger incentive for great hosts to continue hosting.

* Edit :: I run operations at Beyond, have hosted for years on Airbnb, and helped design this - appreciate the question

This is awesome. I'm very impressed by the concept and design. Do you guys have any kind of development blog, etc? Would love to read more about the development process, timeline, etc, and my initial googling comes up totally blank.

Would definitely use the pricing tool, and maybe the management service too if I were Airbnb'ing my place.

Thank you -- we appreciate that!

We're going to be sharing a lot more in the coming weeks.

There is a lot of interesting data out there, and making sense of that data/making it available is one of our teams goals.

If you have any ideas, send them my way: andrew@beyondstays.com

I agree, and it depends. In super high-demand, low-supply markets like Manhattan and San Francisco, I opt for the hotel over Airbnb. The price difference is usually minor, and the hotels in these cities often have better amenities than the crappy studios and efficiencies being offered.

On the other hand, in Boston, Montreal, and a plethora of international destinations, Airbnb 110% of the time. Most cities don't have the demand that Manhattan has, and everyone wants to make a quick buck renting their apartment out to some friendly guests. The markets tend to be so saturated with great places, from my experience, that raising the price is more likely going to hurt the probability of finding someone who will rent it.

If hosts don't use this, then you get sold out listings.

I was in Boston in November. Normally there would be a range of listings in the $60-$120 range, and then some in the ultra-pricey $250-$500 range.

Except there was a yatch race on, an ALL but one of the affordable listings was booked. I researched, and there really were dozens of listings that were normally cheap, but they were full.

I fortunately got the last affordable place in town. But I would have been much happier if some of the other hosts had charged a small premium. I was almost forced into a luxury listing.

Good point -- in response we'd say: 'pricing is hard!'

Its pretty rare that an individual hosts will have enough information to accurately/comfortably price their home.

By studying larger trends across a municipality, we think we can help paint a clearer picture for these hosts, both for short term price surges & also for how they should set the base price their home.

I also expect you could help mobilize spare capacity. I know some hosts who rent out their space one weekend a year and make $500-$600. They just go on a short vacation when the major festival hits town.

They get easy money, guests find space. With more spare capacity, I'd bet the average price would drop and more people would be happy.

I'd personally love a travel site that aggregates Airbnb & VRBO & Hotels. Listing everything a city has to offer on a single site could be a real differentiator to sites like Kayak.

That would be awesome. Especially when you're going to markets that aren't that big and have a ton of Airbnb's and whatnot. It'd be great to have one place list the entire realm of places to stay.

Hipmunk does this with Airbnb listings: http://www.hipmunk.com/hotels-search

I believe that's what these guys are trying to do http://alltherooms.com/

Best one out there IMO: https://outpost.travel They aggregate a huge chunk of them.

i've used these guys before. Seems pretty good

https://outpost.travel/

We do this! Check out http://www.tripping.com/

Tripping is the top metasearch site for vacation rentals with over 1 million homes worldwide. We also have the richest data set in the industry, so it'll be fun to see how our data compares with BeyondStays.

Tripping is great! Two thumbs up.

Thanks Nick!

We've explored integrating other property types on Room77.com in addition to our hotel metasearch but there are some things we encountered that we need to work through first:

- Hotel metasearch is a real-time pricing and booking option. VRBO and AirBnB by and large are lead generation based so you don't have real time availability on a majority of the properties. This means that a lot of the listings may already be booked and you wouldn't know until you contact the owner.

- Location accuracy is a challenge. Home owners don't want to provide exact addresses due to privacy reasons so for a lot of properties, owners have chosen to provide an "approximate" location which leads to a lot of properties in a neighborhood sharing the same exact lat/long and a lot of stacked pins or clusters on a map.

For reference, here's a general idea of the number of property types: 300,000+ hotels, 550,000+ vacation homes, 300,000+ airbnb listings (lots of cross listing with vacation rental sites for sure), 50,000+ hostels = ~1M properties bookable after deduplication.

Somewhat scary to see that at around $190 for one bedroom, there are nights when AirBnb is more expensive than 4-star hotels like Westin.

The hotels have been downgrading the quality around their brand names for years now, cramming people into tinier and more cookie-cutter spaces. Plus the average Airbnb has always had more livable space (not to mention a kitchen!) than a hotel. For 190 a night, you're probably getting the whole Airbnb unit to yourself.

Take that, and SF's 14% hotel tax, and I think they're reaping what they've sowed.

It's not unusual for airbnb to be more expensive than hotel.

When I was in vietnam, all I had to do was go around to a couple of hotels and ask for the price in person.

Many hotels are not advertised online. And even though the space is smaller, I prefer it over airbnb. More anonymity and room service.

Am I the only one who has noticed that hotel is cheaper than Airbnb? Especially in SE asian countries, you can actually haggle hotel prices if staying for extended amount of time.

Even without that, it's still cheaper in some cases to stay at a hotel and with the added bonus of room service.

A little scary to me that their entire business is dependent on another business. Yeah, yeah, Airbnb is successful, but I imagine there are a bunch of ways Airbnb could mess with them if they ever felt the need.

This happens all the time.

Build tools and managers to till the kingdom then pray the king shows mercy and buys you out.

A solid strategy I suppose, just not a risk I'd personally take.

When is someone going to build the exact opposite for guests ;-)

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