How to avoid common pricing mistakes with Anurag Verma of Pricelabs - 10 Minute Highlight

For those we very briefly mentioned Price Labs. But for those who have never heard of a pricing tool, because there are a couple of companies out there that do it. The reason why I reached out to you is that I believe that you are the best at it. If you could just explain to someone, explain to me, I've never heard of it before in say, simplistic terms, what do you do and how do you benefit A short stay accommodation owner, he.

Started off there to say, hey, at least everybody should be doing seasonal price, care, property and bulk. So that was like we started off there to say, hey, at least everybody should be doing seasonal pricing. But then there's a lot more to it. Like weekends have usually have a lot more demand than weekdays. There might be a big holiday or an event coming up where you can increase prices or maybe if nobody is booking, you should reduce your prices. So what we tend to say is don't keep prices static. Even if you have seasonal prices, weekend prices go in often and change those. And what dynamic pricing services do is do that on your behalf. You still get to set controls. You still get to say, in high season, don't drop my prices this even in low season, but let some automation do the work for you.

I like the AI aspect of it, the automation aspect of it, because you're 100% right. Hello, my name is Mark Simonson and welcome to the Boostly podcast. We are in season seven, episode six and today we're talking about pricing. Sam, Like me, but for years I have manually updated the pricing for my family business, the granary. I sit every Monday and I look at the prices and I adjust go up or go down accordingly. And there are times then I really make a mistake here and I either price is too low or I price is too high. I may be missing event that's coming up now. The reason why I've got Price Labs onto this episode is because they offer a dynamic tool that will help you with this based on their AI and also their member feedback. Now you may be thinking, well, I just use Airbnb for this. Well, Airbnb's model, I don't like it. Booking.com used to offer this. They've stopped doing it now. Price Labs have come in five years into the business. They got a lot of really good feedback and have got a real, really good reviews. Danny, a good friend of mine from Optimize my bnb, he recommended Price Labs to me. So I really wanted to get them on the podcast. We are very lucky to have them on today because they are super busy putting plans together for their future projects. I got the co founder Anurag on and he's based in Chicago. We had a great chat. We talked about the most common pain points of Price Lab members. We look at some of the strategies that you could adopt and how you can bring it into your business. And also as well as a free download for everybody that is listening or watching this podcast. All you need to do is go to boostly.co.uk forward/price lab. P R, I, C E L A, B Go there, check out the blog that they did for the Boostly website. In there is a link to the free download that will help you get started with your pricing strategy. So without further ado, let's flip over to Anurag of Price Labs and we're talking all about pricing.

A little bit of background. We started Price Labs about five years back. Before that I was doing the same dynamic pricing and revenue management stuff for United Airlines. So my background is in math and statistics. It was sort of a natural fit to do revenue management and pricing for an airline which uses a lot of that stuff. But a couple of my co founders figured out that at some point that they were hosting on Airbnb and it made sense if Airbnb also had something similar and it didn't. That's how we started off. Like we were like, maybe we should build something that will help short term rentals and vacation rentals to pricing as well as a large company like United Airlines or any other big company can do. Right?

Price Labs have been going for five years. I guess it's always nice to kick off with this one. What was the one bit of advice that you wish that you had before starting Price Labs and starting up this huge business?

The biggest one is the value of user feedback in some ways. Right? So when we started early on, from our background, from my background, it was very easy to get user feedback. Feedback in my previous role because we were working with the people, for example, at United Airlines, we would build stuff. We would meet these people every day or every week and get feedback from how things are going, what do they want built next and things like that.

For those we very briefly mentioned Price Labs, but for those who have never heard of a pricing tool, because there are a couple of companies out there that do it. The reason why I reached out to you is that I believe that you are the best. If you could just explain to someone, explain to me, I've never heard of it before in very simplistic terms. What do you do and how do you benefit? Like short stay accommodation owner.

We started off there to say hey, at least everybody should be doing seasonal pricing or property and book. So that was like we started off there to say hey, at least everybody should be doing seasonal pricing. But then there's a lot more to it. Like weekends have usually have a lot more demand than weekdays. There might be a big holiday or an event coming up where you can increase prices or maybe if nobody is booking, you should reduce your prices. So what we tend to say is don't keep prices static. Even if you have seasonal prices, weekend prices go in often and change those. And what dynamic pricing services do is do that on your behalf. You still get to set controls, you still get to say in high season, don't drop my prices this even in low season, but let some automation do the work for you.

I like the AI aspect of it, the automation aspect of it, because you're 100% right. I know. Speaking from personal experience, I used to be on our PMS every single Monday of every week and looking at what was coming up and I was always manually doing that. And sometimes you would just miss something. It's, it's very easily done whether there was a big event coming up nearby or whether there was just a sudden spike in demand, quite easily missed. And for those that have never heard of this sort of software and specifically for those that say, have got guest houses or short term rentals in touristy areas, having a pricing tool to aid them is only going to benefit them in the long run. So if you're listening to this, I'd love for you to interact. Go onto Twitter, you can ostleruk, you can pricelabs and you can just say what are you doing with your pricing? The show is what is the one common mistake that you see owners make when it comes to pricing their property? But I believe it stands static is probably going to be the main answer. But is there anything else that you see mistakes that owners are making and.

It gets you almost all the way there in terms of making sure you're always up to date in some ways there's like you said, if you're doing it manually, you'll still miss a few things, but at least you're going to do way better than if you set something in the beginning of the year and then just never touch it the other. So when we are talking about pricing, but we tend to think of this as revenue management like which is a little more wholesome and it includes other things as well. So for example, minimum stays is a super important factor when it comes increasing your revenue. So it's not just setting the right prices, but also making sure right minimums.

I guess where I look at it now, you will know this and everybody knows this. Airbnb offers something similar where it's like dynamic pricing within their model. The reason why I look to price labs is because I believe that you just take that model and you just throw a bit of Popeye spinach on it and you make it amazing.