In what can be viewed as a sign of the times, revenue management for home rentals won the day at EyeforTravel’s recent startup and innovation awards in Las Vegas
It was a startup that automatically generates and uploads pricing for rental properties on Airbnb, VRBO and Flipkey that beat off the competition to take home the top prize at the recent 2016 EyeforTravel North America conference at the Palm Hotel in Las Vegas earlier this month.
Described as the most popular revenue management and dynamic pricing software for the $100bn rental and home-sharing market, Beyond Pricing was nominated by a panel of judges led by Travelocity founder Terry Jones and voted by the audience.
Andrew Hennigan caught up with co-founder and CEO Ian McHenry after the conference to find out more about what he believes is propelling the industry forward.
EFT: How prevalent is automatic pricing for rentals? Is it going to become standard practice for renters anytime soon?
IM: Revenue management is just starting to catch on in the vacation and short-term rental space. Similar to how it took a while for hotels to adopt a more sophisticated approach after airlines pioneering the practice, vacation rentals took a long time to really focus on revenue management. When Beyond Pricing started three years ago, no one was really doing it in the space. In just the last year, it’s become the top priority for most vacation rental property managers, software providers, and listing sites.
Part of the challenge of RM for vacation rentals was that getting the data to drive automated pricing decisions was difficult. Doing everything manually was too time-consuming for an industry where the average manager only has 100 or so listings and there are practically no brands, as you have in the hotel space. Automated pricing almost makes more sense in vacation rentals because of the smaller number of managers and the limited resources they have.
Read rest of the article at Eye for Travel
