Pricelabs - How To Create Your Comparison Sets

Okay, everybody, so we are living in a time which is data drives, Everything is king. You need to know what is going on in your industry, in your market. And today we are diving in with a special guest who's going to show us how we can get the very best out of the data that's available to us and where you can go and look for this data. So if this is your first time here, you're listening to the Boostly podcast. This is a podcast that gives host the tools, the tactics, the trainings and the confidence to go out there and get more direct bookings. My name is Liam Carolan and my special guest today, we've got Faustu. He's the head of strategic partnerships at Price Labs. Now, some of you will be listening to this, going, yeah, I've heard of Price Labs. Yeah, I know what it does. Well, even if you've heard of Price Labs, they're constantly, constantly looking at new features and data all the time. It's worth just going back, looking at your settings, listening to the experts, listening to people who are from Price Labs and how you can really perfect your, your comps and your data sets. And that's what we're going to be doing today. If you've not heard of Price Labs, please do type Price Labs into a Google search. They're an amazing company and they help you with dynamic pricing. So before I cover too much of that, let's dive in. Let's say hi to Faustu and welcome along. So welcome along.

Hi. Hi, Liam. Thank you for having me.

Thank you for the invitation.

So I was introduced already, but we'll introduce a little bit more. So my name is Fausto. I'm with Priceless for three and a half years now. We were a small team, now we are a very big team at the moment. I've done some other things in pricefiles, but at the moment I'm working with the strategic partnerships mainly focused on Europe and Latam. And I was a Price Lab user before, so I was a revenue manager before joining Price Labs and I was a Price Labs user for two or three years before joining the team. So for people who don't know what price of this, we are a revenue management system, basically split between three different main tools or features, I.e. dynamic pricing, market data and reports. The idea is for people to be able to apply, like see their strategy, look at metrics, look at the KPI, see how the market is doing and apply those tactics and strategies inside Price Labs. Don't need to be jumping between systems, etcetera and have all in one in terms of a revenue management system, nothing else.

I'm a big fan of Price Labs because one I, I use Price Labs in my short term rental business itself. But also the more I find out about Price Labs, the more I use it and the more I realize the value of it. So if you're a host who's, who's listening to this and you've only got one property and you're just wondering what's going on in the market, then you know, Price Labs can help you with that. But also if you're a property manager and got a huge portfolio, likelihood is you're already using, you know, Price Labs or a dynamic pricing tool. But even if you're already doing that, just make sure you're relooking at some of the settings and what your team could do to get the very best out of it. And today we're finding out about a new bespoke custom data report which is really cool. So I'll hand the mic over to you fastu and yeah, take it away with what you want to share with everybody.

Yeah. So basically and just to explain why, why it's important to be always updated even if you're using a tool for years, it's always, when you're using at least a revenue management system, you should be able to keep updated. Look at your revenue management system. It doesn't matter which one you use, you should look at the updates because it's, it's really like revenue management is a complex topic and the biggest difficulty that we have is trying to make the product as easy to use as possible in spite it has to solve a complex topic.

Right.

So there's always a lot of updates, a lot of new features, a lot of features that are, it's the same feature but the way it works changes. So if you are, if you're not keeping updated with your revenue management system and if it's a good revenue management system, probably you are only getting like 30, 40, 50, 60% of it. I've seen some clients that really don't get everything that they can do of the tool that they are using. And about this market report, like custom diary report, we noticed that one of the biggest, we created our market dashboard that basically it's a market data tool so you can use it even if you don't have properties and you are not using dynamic pricing, just if you want to get some market items, you can use it. So it's, it's an independent tool of the, of the Dynamic pricing tool. But we notice that a lot of our users told us like it is awesome, we can get data, we can look at market data, we can see how the market is going. But we always struggle to be able to define what market is for us. So because it depends, right, you have to be able to do a right segmentation to get the best out of it. So this is in terms of revenue management, like traditionally what we call it concept. So we have to define our own concept and it's our competitors that we want to track, right? Or even if you are investing in a market that you just want to look at market data, you have to be able to select what is a market for you, what do you want to track it. So this is one of the main updates that we had in the market task force that you can create your custom data report. So you can create even one by one go listing by listing in a certain region in a certain area. And the market passwords can have different sizes. So you can get a market password with 1000 listings, 5000 or 10,000 and 10,000. It's a very wide area. In some countries, depending on the city, it might be more than one city, 10,000 listings. And you can customize and create your own concepts. You can do it one by one, even manually, if you know your competitors or based on certain criteria. Imagine I only want to see two bedrooms with more than a certain ranking and more than a certain number amount of reviews that has a pool and that the set packs, for example, something like that. So you are able to select your criteria and create comp sets based on that criteria. And then you can look at the market, market data, market behavior, etc. But specifically made for you. So you can create the ones that you want to track. And why is this important? This is important because this will remove the main issue for someone that is new to market data and dynamic pressing. That is how do I know that you are using the right data? How do I know that you have the right data? How do I know that you. That I. I am able to benchmark with my real competitors, right? So that's, that's our goal. It's having you giving you full transparency and giving total freedom to create your market data, create your concepts and being able to benchmark your results to your concept, not to everyone else concept.

That's cool. So basically if I'm a host and I'm thinking, hey, do you know what? I'm in one market, I'm going to go to the market which is 50 miles away or whatever it is. I don't need to subscribe to Price Labs with the, with a listing straight away. I can just go there and just get the market data. I can, I can get the, the custom market report, purchase that and then get that data. And not only that, I can actually see the data sets of who will be my competitors. What sort of data will will hosts and people like myself be able to get access to? Just give us an overview of what we can see and why that's going to be important.

Yeah, so you have access to the main KPIs like ADR occupancy, like average day rate occupancy, length of stay, the booking window. When people booking in your market, you can see this by periods, for example in the last year, in the last 30 days, in the last seven days. But you can also see the average per month. You can look at the occupancy as well. One that I really like is length of stay occupancy. So you can see the occupancy and what, and the length of stay. What is the weight of each length of stay in those occupancies? So for example, is my market very strong in bookings of more than 30 days or is my market strong in bookings of 2 days or 1 day? To understand if the total occupancy, what is the percentage of nights that come from bookings of two nights or seven nights, et cetera. So usually these main KPIs, you can also compare your prices. You can even see like the most common amenities, the cancellation policy that your competitors are using, the value of extra cash that your competitors are charging, the amount of people doing weekly discounts, monthly discounts. So there's a huge amount of information. And why is this custom concepts very useful? Because we will be able to see at the listing level and you can open the link and see it. In this case, our market passwords for the moment have Airbnb and Verbal. We will add booking.com at some point. I don't want to tell which state because I don't want to over promise. But we are using booking.com data in our dynamic pricing tool. We are planning on adding it to the market dashboard. And you can see all this data, you can create your concepts and then all, all these graphs, all this information, all this will be for each comp set that you have as you can navigate through compats. So you can create eight comp sets if you want and give it some name and then you can change and see all the data of the market for this concept, very important as well. You can see future data, what is on the books today, right? What is confirmed today. But you can also see past data and usually you can see at least the last year, you can see how it, how it was in terms of occupancy, adr, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera in all other metrics. So I think the main KPIs are covered and there's even some extras like cancellation policy mandates and all the rest.

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And the good thing about that is that even for hosts who are just focusing on one area, I mean myself, we focus on one particular city, but we have different types of houses. You know, some can cope with 12 people, some can only cope with a studio apartment. And obviously being able to compare those two completely different data sets is so important for us. You can actually look at, hey, what is the average price for, you know, a one bedroom studio versus a five bedroom house? And as long as you've got an idea of what those are, you can then take that and put that into your, you know, your listing, your figures even before you take on a property. And that's the fantastic thing, is that you can have a good idea of how well a unit's going to perform well before you commit to whatever that unit is, whether it's bought, arbitrage or management.

Also let me just add one thing in this feature with the concept, there's also one thing that we added that is very important. You can use this market dashboards. But if you are using one, and after you have the concepts created in the neighborhood data, for example, that is in the dynamic pricing tool, like a feature that calls neighborhood data, or even in the portfolio analytics, that is the reporting tool of pricelines, you can select these concepts to use as benchmark. So instead of using the default data, you can go there and customize and say I want to now to benchmark with these concepts and the same for your, for the portfolio analyst, that is your results. So your result, your real data, like from your properties, then you can say, okay, I want now to benchmark with the comp set that I created. And this is, and this is very useful because at the end the same we want to compare if our result was better or worse than our own specific concept that we created. So it's very simple to use it now in, in Price.

I know there's a lot of people who have listened to this and go do you know what? I'm just not very techy. I don't understand the figures and the numbers. What would you say to those people? How does Price Lab help to sort that out? You know, like for the people who just don't know what to do, what kind of features and tools and what would you say to them?

So we have several ways of helping. We have daily webinars, for example in English we have webinars in five languages, but daily it's in English. Then we have weekly in Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese as well. We have our support team that speaks all these languages. I think a couple more. But at least these five are covered officially. So you can and they work 24 hours, seven days a week. So you can contact our support team. But of course if you need a call and depending on the complexity of your account, you might be able to do it with the help of our support team or you might be assigned an account manager that will help you to set everything and that will help you like with my weekly calls for example, at the beginning or a weekly call at the beginning, then monthly calls, quarter calls, whatever you you might need. For example, in my case, in spite time with the in charge of partnerships, I still do some account management with all clients because before I was doing account management in the business development. So I still have like monthly calls or with some clients every quarter because they just wanted every quarter. So we, we have the, our the account manager as well assigned to the clients. But it depends a little bit on the complexity of the account, the size of the account, et cetera, how it is linked. If you have one property, probably our support team will help you to set up and do your own boarding. But if you have like 100, you probably will need certain specific settings that you will do it with onboarding calls with us, but for everyone, our support team is really great. I think it's probably one of the strengths of Pricelines and they are very fast and friendly and they can help you to set up everything and I.

Think from what I've seen, one of the benefits, because I'm not a tech person, but as soon as you go on there, you know the, there's a setting on there which you can select and that'll say recommended settings. You press it and that'll say do you want longer midterm states? Do you want short term stays? You select and says, hey, this is what we would recommend. But you can override it. You know, you can say actually you don't want one night stay. You can have a minimum two nights day. And that's the cool thing, is that it just gives you very easy settings to be able to have a starting point. And of course you can tweak as, as time goes on, which is, which is cool. So you mentioned midterm. You know, there's some people who want longer stays and for me this is one of the things which in our area we do have contractors, they stay for, for longer periods. Would you have any advice for those people? What should they be looking at? So if you're somebody who isn't trying to get the most optimum price on a single say Saturday night for that one night stay for 12 guests, what should the people who do more midterm stays be looking at within price labs?

I think if you focus on midterm stays, I think in general, not only in terms of pricing, in general, your strategy should be a little bit different. Like you should adapt your description, you should adapt maybe your photos, you should adapt even your product, right? Your apartments having amenities that what people want for a midterm. But in terms of certain strategies, I will say that if you can, if you, you can focus, but you have to be very careful with booking windows. You have to have a very good strategy of booking windows. If you focus on midterm, probably it's not a good idea to accept for example, someone checking in in three weeks. What do you do with the next 20 days or 90 days or 80 days, can you sell it daily? If you can, if you want to focus on midterm, but you still accept like two days or three days, four days in gaps or in the last minute you should have this very clear like, okay, I want to focus. And you should use, for example in price lab you can use the minimum state settings because at the end when you focus in midterm, price in some cases start to become like not the priority, the minimum stay is the priority. So you have to have to be sure that you can set a good minimum state strategy. In PriceHub, you can do something. For example, if someone is Booking more than 15 days in advance or 30 days in advance, I want a minimum of 30 days or 15 days but for the next 10 days I will accept a minimum of 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 or 7. Using this and opening gaps, I think it's the most important is playing very well with the minimum stays. Don't accept 30 days. For someone that wants to check in in 10 months, don't accept but open like in last minute. So having your minimum stay strategy is very important and one very. It seems very simple what I've seen when I was a revenue manager as well that some. But sometimes people forget if you're selling daily but you want to focus on midterm, use your monthly discount. Sometimes people say I don't want to give 40% of monthly discount or 35% is very high. But in reality what is your average in a month is 60%. It's the same having 100% with 40% discount, then having a 60% if you're selling daily, if the price is the same. So you can still have daily prices and use weekly discounts, monthly discounts or bi weekly discounts. To set your strategy in terms of mental state.

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Oh, that's really cool. And I mean just drawing everyone's attention to that, that point that you can, you know, like if you've got midterm stay three weeks out from now, you can set your, you know, orphan nights. In other words, you can't take another three week book and in two weeks, you know, within the next two weeks so you can set it to say take set to seven night stays or you can three nights, days, whatever it is that you want to take to fill that gap and make sure your calendar's nice and full and the benefit of a host who you know say, say you don't mind short Term stays, but actually for anyone booking more than two months out that you'd really want a minimum of seven nights, you can do that. So you can have a two night stay as your basic. But for future, you know, for over 30 days or over 60 days out, you can set it seven days. And it's just great to have that flexibility that let's be honest, the online travel agents, they're basically like, hey, how many days do you want? And if everybody sets to just two days or two night stays, then you know, Christmas is going to be booked, you know, the high in demand dates are going to be booked with these just two little short stays, whereas you might have got a longer booking. And this is the benefit where it isn't just looking at price, you know, the most optimum price, it's actually helping you to get the best length of stay, reduce cleaning fees that way as well and you know all that cool stuff. So one question I'd love to ask and this all the talk at the moment is about AI is is there anything that Price Labs is going to be doing around AI or is there anything else you're excited that's coming along in the future?

I think AI of course is one of the main topics everywhere. But I also think that we still like, at least, even I like but the majority of people, I don't think we are very clear what AI means and is like. Everyone talks about AI but at the end, I don't know is machine learning AI, is it? What specifically is AI? So if machine learning and other things, if all of this is AI. So of course Price uses AI as well. I think some people think that AI is some other things. So at the end, without having a standard definition of AI, I'm not sure what we should consider AI. But we of course we use AI and we use big data like even, even, even we create even a small tool that it's like better just test. Everyone can go to our website and do it that we. We are using ChatGPT under the hood, right? And you just put the location of your property if you want to target like couples, et cetera, the language. And it will give you a title and a description for example for your, for your listing. So we use AI, we use AI with our data sensing. But I'm still not sure sometimes and I go to a lot of events and people ask about AI and sometimes I'm still not sure exactly what is the, the boundary of AI. Is this AI or not? Is this or not? So at the end I will Say that we use AI already, but I think it's still a lot more opportunities to add.

That's a very good answer.

I think one of the. One of the most interesting things that we will see with AI is if you, if you work worldwide and you have clients worldwide, the speed will not be of. Of adapting. AI will not be the same for everyone. Right? You might adapt AI in your operation if you are a host, for example, very easily in the US some cities in Europe. But then if you want, in some cities in Latin America, you cannot have AI and be completely AI if you have power cuts, for example, and AI will not work. So at the end I think it's going to be interesting because AI is very accessible everywhere. But then there's some infrastructure issues that will. AI will be adapted much easier in some places than others. So this is my personal curiosity. How will hosts adapt depending on the location and depending on the target of their guests?

You make a very good point. As you say, power cuts often in virtual assistants, there's often power cuts and things like that. AI isn't going to work. Your guests are not going to get a response at that stage, are they? So that's a very good point. Fausto, I just would love to ask just a couple of questions about yourself before we let everybody know how they can go find out more information. So just give us a bit of background. What did you do before Price Labs? What was your history?

So I've worked in tourism and events for many years. So I studied tourist management. I worked with the tour operators and travel agency for some time and then I went more to the event side. Then I went to Colombia to spend three months. I stayed for five years and I started working short term rentals there. I've worked in lapel before, but the short term rental specifically there was a project there that I really got. I didn't know anything about short term rentals, only hotel. And then I just got in love with the industry. The thing that I love the most was at that time it was like maybe in 2015 or 2014, there was so many things new that we can create. There was nothing like when I started to look for information. When I started to look, for example for a revenue management course about short term manager association, nothing existed, right? So everything was new. So we could create a lot of things that were new and innovative. So that's why I enjoy. And I worked in that company that was a. A pretty large company. And we're doing a very interesting project between co living, co working short Term rentals, et cetera. Like and 10 years ago almost and I started in operations and then I went to revenue management. I stayed with them for some years. When I left I was a Price Funds user in by coincidence I was leaving and Price Funds was starting to grow. So I just started. I was like invited to join Price Labs and I've been here and I will stay here for, for the moment. For the moment and I don't have any plans. I really like Price Labs. I think it's, it's a wonderful team. The, the main, the main work why I, I decided to save Price Labs was mainly by the team because of the team and the project, but mainly because of the team.

Yeah, it really shines through. I mean everybody I talk to at Price Labs is so helpful. The support's so good. Everybody. She has gems of knowledge. I mentioned just before we went live that I was speaking to a representative of your team and they taught me about the price. There's a setting within if you subscribe to Price Labs which is about the aggressiveness factor of the date. So on peak dates it pushes the price up and on trough dates it pushes it down basically so you're more likely to get booking and they just gave me some help over that. Instead of having it as aggressive, I needed to have it as sort of slightly less aggressive or normal and things like that. And just getting that kind of help is, is just ideal. And what I love about asking you about like the background of the question is you mentioned that you fell in love with the industry and so many people listening to this have at some stage. I mean don't get me wrong, this, this frustrating times in short term rental. Sure there is but for the most part this is an industry which is good fun. We help people come and stay, create lifetime memories and you know, that's fun in itself, isn't it? So yeah. Thank you so much for, for today. So just before we share the details, I'd love to just know is there a movie or a TV series or something that we should all go and check out that you absolutely love at the moment that we should all stick on our watch list.

I've seen one but it's. It's going to be hard. I don't know. Maybe there is. I'm not sure if it's worldwide. In Netflix there was a, a series but plus a Portuguese series in Netflix that I really loved. It was one of the first that I really liked and the name is. I don't know if it's. And it's it's based on a true story in. In the Stories Islands. I think that is something interesting if people want to look at. I think it's worldwide in Netflix.

Yeah. Well, if not they'll have the subtitles and stuff like that. So we can go and check it out. So where can we find out more about Price Labs or yourself?

You can go to our website. You have a chat, you have the email. If you want to talk with me specifically for something, it's. I can tell it's faustoricricric. My email. You can send me an email, but you can write on our website and our support team will answer you or Write directly to supportriclabs.co.

Thank you so much, Fausto. That is fantastic. Was there anything we missed along the way? Or is that. Is that everything?

I think it's everything. I think we covered everything. Yeah.

Awesome. Thank you so much for today. So, as a host, go and check out Price Labs. If you've listened to this and you're inspired to go and check them out, please do so. But also share this with somebody else who may be able to get some value out of it that might not know about Price Labs or some of the awesome new reports, custom data reports and things like that which are coming out. Thank you for listening to Boostly. We know there's a lot of places you can put your attention and really thank you for putting it with us. That's it for now and we'll see you on the next one. There are for now.