Beyond Pricing – Automatic Dynamic Pricing for Airbnb
beyondpricing.com
beyondpricing.com
I guess the rule of thumb is that even when costs are eroded, profits increased, intermediaries disintermediated... the prices will rise to the maximum levels that the market will bear.
It just takes away the magic of being able to find that rare, cheap and great place. The sharing culture is now less sharing.
http://www.businessinsider.com/couchsurfing-the-best-hook-up...
They don't do anything to improve Hacker News.
For what it's worth, I actually agree with your point. The parent of your first comment was (at least to some degree) derailing the conversation. I didn't even consider that it was a derailment until your second comment.
I think you did have something valuable to add to the discussion, but I did not initially see it because your first comment was so pointlessly unnecessary.
Based on you pointing out the behaviour, I will now try to recognise and downvote 'concern trolling' that derails conversations. It's unfortunate that you weren't able to communicate that more effectively the first time.
I do know one friend who wound up dating a guy she hosted as a couchsurfer, but I don't know if anything happened when he was staying with her that first time.
The review system on couchsurfing is good. I'm male, so I'm going to have an easier time, but I've never had a problem with couchsurfing. I've stayed with and hosted a few dozen people.
Before I take ANY guest or send a request, I go over their whole profile, their reviews, their photos. Do them seem cool? Do they seem normal, no creepy vibe? Do they have reviews? Do the reviews go beyond "Jack is a nice man. He stayed with me two days."?
If they are "yes" on all counts, not only have they been safe, but they've been among the most interesting people I've met in 28 years on this earth.
Women should heighten scrutiny on all counts, and also check for "do they only host women?". Do they have even a SINGLE negative review or sign of creepy behavior?
Suffice to say, I've met plenty of women travelers who find couchsurfing a great experience, including while traveling alone. I'm not speaking out of male ignorance.
AirBnB will probably do this eventually. But BeyondPricing likely has plans far beyond AirBnB.
Price has always been about demand versus supply, not demand versus cost. Reducing costs in situations where supply is constrained by some other factor will just increase profits.
True, but it needs one of the two following conditions:
1. In the long run 2. In a fairly competitive market
It's true that it's increasingly converging towards becoming a competitor to standard vacation-rental sites like booking.com and HomeAway, though, which come with different expectations.
Your statement is both myopic and mentally violent with a touch of naivete - price is always an illusion which is modified to fit the actual relationship between buyer and seller.
There are so many instances where the price can actually mean "what the seller is comfortable getting for his product"
Shoot the "market can bear " bs in the face.
It feels vaguely like the Pikkety rumpus - like a right wing think tank would approve of the "destroy the red tape holdin us back" when mostly it's not red tape, it's someone else's property.
I don't have the right words for the approach - it's hoping we get too big before we get caught.
That said, you can preview the prices for a listing without logging in - click the "preview your listing" button on the demo page.
It's supply and demand, like any other business. Airbnb is still awesome - it's a huge step up from hotels and hostels, and outside of the insular tech world it's still far from established. If you think it's too expensive or whatever just don't use it.
Unless you are hoping to run your listing hands-off and full-time (the "always on" instant book-able listing), however, I think that out-sourcing the pricing removes the control you have over differentiating your offering.
It has been my experience that furniture staging, photography, listing reviews/reputation, and the lister's profile all have dramatic impact on the amount you can charge for what is otherwise a very normal apartment. In this highly differentiated environment, it would be hard to model truly optimal pricing.
I imagine that what Beyond, Smart Host, and the like can do first and foremost is help you maximize occupancy, which certainly has the potential to increase your earnings if you are not a high-demand listing.
Sorry! Pricing is not yet available in Mountain View.
However, a lot of pricing on there does seems to be guesswork, wildly varying, sometimes really cheap and sometimes really expensive. So if this helps enough people to price their property better then that's something I can get behind.
1. Get sellers used to visiting www.beyondpricing.com instead of www.airbnb.com - you don't have any problems attracting sellers, because you can get their listing in front of as many people as airbnb.
2. Add some sort of multi-site listing search or something, to get buyers also visiting you directly instead of going via airbnb. Advertise your site on your sellers' airbnb listings.
3. Once buyers and sellers are used to using your site instead of airbnb, launch your own listings service and cut airbnb out all together. (Or better yet, launch your own listings and only invite the profitable low maintenance buyers and sellers with established histories, leaving the dregs to airbnb)
This allows you to sidestep the problem of "sellers don't want to use us as there are no buyers, buyers don't want to use us because there are no sellers".
(Yes, I know. It works in Safari. But that is not the point.)
This is my first project where I've developed with an IE10+ only policy, which is actually really nice because of flex box, but it's easy to accidentally break other browsers if you miss a single prefix.
Thank you very much.
We model local demand for each night by modeling hotel prices, flight data, conference attendance & more.
If prices didn't move then the market wouldn't clear, and some capacity or demand (at the current price) would be wasted.
If prices didn't move fast enough in response to changes in demand/supply then the market wouldn't clear, and some capacity or demand (at the current price) would be wasted.