Pricing Your Rental The Right Way With Dynamic Pricing Tools

Welcome along to the new episode of the Boostly podcast. Today we are shining the spotlight on Price Labs and also on the book Direct Blueprint which is an up and coming book sort of collated by Mark Simpson and really talks about industry experts and leaders from all areas of hospitality and services that you need to know about as a host yourself. Today we're really excited because we're actually joined by two of the members from Price Labs. Got Anurag who is the co founder of Price Labs and we've got Thibaut who is the head of, he's kind of the outreach and growth side of things. Is that right Thibaut?

Yeah, that's about right.

Awesome, awesome. So today we're going to dive straight, straight into it and really bring those guys into the conversation and yeah, let's find out more about Price Labs and why something that you as a host need to know about as well. So welcome along Anurag.

Thank you so much Liam and welcome along Seabug.

Hello Liam and hello to the whole Busly family.

Thank you so much for joining us. So let's dive straight in and first question we'll go to you Anurag, which is how did the book come about and why did you get involved in the book? Direct Blueprint?

Yeah, so we generally, I don't know if everybody knows about Tri Slabs or not, but we, we are more on the data and dynamic pricing side of things and not necessarily, you know, the book Direct Movement directly. What has happened over the years is a lot of our customers do have their own direct booking websites and this question always kept coming up that hey, I'm using you guys for dynamic pricing. It gets published through my PMS to these different OTAs. But how do I get those dynamic prices on my own website which a lot of times they were hosted via some WordPress plugins or things like that. So this question kept coming up and at one point, many, many years back, I reached out to Mark to say like hey, what's up here? What do we need to do to get these rates? And he gave a very clear answer of how this distribution is supposed to happen. But frankly Mark and I started talking right about then about this, about other topics as well. There were other members of the Boostly community who were using Price Labs. So he had heard of us. I think earlier this year he reached out to say, hey, we are doing a follow up book on Book Direct and we want to get thoughts from multiple perspectives this time. And the thought was, can a big group of us who each specialize in a certain part, part of this vacation rental ecosystem, come together and write a chapter on what they know about it. So that's where it started off. And we were happy to contribute, put down whatever little we know about BookDirect and a lot that we know about revenue management and married them together and put our chapter out.

I mean revenue management and particularly whether it's book direct or not is just so important. I know that I used to spend the days trying to choose the perfect rate and I ended up on that typical host who ended up where I had two different pricing, one for winter, one for summer. And exactly. There's, there's a part of. I'm lucky enough to see some of the your chapter beforehand. And you're absolutely right. That's exactly what most people do. It actually mentions it in there. And whether I had lots of bookings sometimes or no bookings at others, that was, that was what the result was. Just by having that. What message would you say to people who are listening who are in that similar boat?

You mean the boat of setting maybe two rates a year? My number one message to anybody who has never dabbled into revenue management or dynamic pricing is if you have access to it, you probably have somewhere where all your bookings sit. Just go look at different months and see how each month has performed over the years and you'll start to see a pattern like summer. It's not summer and winter if you break it down. July and August are probably different, although they are both in a lot of places. Peak months. June is probably very different from August. And so like you can break it down by month, but then you break it down by day of week and you realize, okay, there is a weekend versus weekday pattern. There's so much going on that setting two rates all year is not the right thing. So like the least I tell anybody is look at seasons a little more granularly than just summer and winter because there's also the shoulder season in between where if you're not looking at it carefully, you're either priced too high or too low. Look at day of week patterns and one of the real sort of no brainers that we see in our industry is because the industry is so fragmented, there is a lot of supply out there unless there's a big holiday coming up or things like that. Generally speaking we see having rates lower a little bit as a date approaches and it's still not booked does give very good results. A lot of these might seem like, hey, you don't need an algorithm to do it. But a lot of the benefit of the algorithm is within these three key areas. If you can just tackle these three, which are all sitting in your own data, you'll be able to tell, okay, 80% of my bookings come outside of 20 days. And which means that if I'm still unbugged in the next 20 days, I need to start doing something to get those dates booked. So where that number is is different for everybody, depending on location, depending on what kind of clientele you have and what kind of portfolio you have. Like business travel, happens last minute versus beach travel. People plan months ahead. The answer is different for anybody, but it's sitting in your data.

I mean, I'm a massive fan of, you know, Price Labs. I'm a host myself outside of Boostly and, and I, I use Price Labs, which I'm proud to say. And it's one of the things which, until you try a service like, like Price Labs, you don't realize how much money you're leaving on the table, which has been so important and eye opening for myself. Thibaut, I'd love to, to come to you. And there'll be people listening to this and perhaps haven't heard of Price Labs, as crazy as it sounds, and I'd love to just yet. A what is Price Labs as like an elevator pitch. And then why should hosts really consider it?

Basically, Price Labs will help hosts increase their revenues, increase as well the occupancy and save them time. What I mean by increases revenues is, for example, if in the future there's a demand spike and you don't know about that, Price Lab will be able to detect this demand spike and increase your prices automatically and push them to, you know, Airbnb, verbal booking or your own website, if you integrate it through pms, for example. And so that you don't miss out on this, for example, imagine there's like, you know, there's a marathon, there's an event happening and you don't know that in your. Not in your city, but nearby and people will be booking your city. You don't miss out on this. And same same thing with the occupancy. Right? I think it's exactly what Anurag was touching upon as well. In the sense that, for example, if you not it's not just about pricing. So about for example, minimum stay rules. Right? You may have to in the future, two existing bookings that are matching your minimum short. Minimum. Minimum stay rules. But maybe you could be a bit more flexible so that you can accept like let's say five fortnight booking between these two big bookings you have. But you need to automate that. If every time you want people to make it so that people who are on instant booking, on Airbnb, on booking and they want to book you should be able to say, you know what, if I do have two existing bookings, yeah, I'm okay for a shorter minimum stay and maybe why not say, you know what, I'm okay with a shorter stay, but I'm going to bump the price by 10%, for example. That's just an example. But you can do that because you can basically put rules and what we call overrides so that the pricing algorithm really obeys what how you're running your business. And that's the thing I want to say about saving time as well. Because if you have like more than one listing, two listings, you have some ways to do things in bulk so suddenly you can update. Let's say you can put together if you have like if you're present, if you are active in two markets, for example, what you can do, you can give different pricing rules, different patterns to your listings in one market compared with other, other, other other things. So again, more revenues, more occupancy and probably saving time as well.

I mean that's one of the things you touched on there is, is the time that it saves. How much time sticking with yourself thibaut on this, how much time should hosts really be spending on tweaking and spending time looking at their rates and revenues? Is it something that they should be doing daily? Weekly? Yeah. What would your advice be around that.

Same board as juliam in a sense that I was also a Price Labs user before joining the company and I have three properties, right. So I would. In terms of time, it's very tricky because I remember before using all this, I would spend my Monday morning was first thing in a week, Monday morning, go back to each and every calendar, make sure everything was okay, updated. If I had a booking, make sure the booking was there and making sure maybe I need to lower my prices as you know, and saying, oh, okay, next 30 I had this like crazy Excel sheet where basically I would enter my base price, my central price and we say okay, next like a scaling stuff like in next 30 days. I know like every day coming back to the day closer to us. I would discount my prices and I'll copy paste this and try to put this in the systems on Airbnb and the rest to be more aggressive to attract bookings. So that's I got my morning mornings back by using Price Labs. But what's interesting though, so it's really important first that people when they start using a tool like Price Lab or any tools like this. Right. There's some kind of. I'm working on the onboarding of users at the moment, for example. Right. And something super important that people set up their base price, the central price, like the, like the, the everything on which the pricing will be evolving. It's super important to spend time and say okay, what's my central price? I can have. And we have tools that can tell you okay, what's happening in your market. That's what we see. You can also give you advice to what your buys price should be. Right. So spend a lot of time on this and spending time also thinking okay, maybe you also need to put some kind of minimum price and set up some. Setting up some rules. I said my minimum stays. Maybe I'm, you know, maybe far out in the future a year from now I want bigger, bigger stays. So only want seven, seven day night or seven night stays for example. So thinking first these rules carefully and then you don't have to do it every day.

Right.

Normally you, you set it up and you start looking at things, how they're rolling for you. If you have a few profit is. And then I would say you need to go back to them. It's not set up and forget either. Right. They need to go back and say okay, I say the base price first. How is that going for me? Right. Is Price Lab now using my own data, my occupancy data and using the market trends, have they changed their prediction for the base price, for example? So I would say it's saving you time, but it's also making you think about other things to do and you do need for example to get back if you have one property just go back once a week to see how things are going. Is this how things are predicted? And again making sure you are. You really, really go and check whether things are really as you. As you want. It's really, really important because it's I think mistakes some people do. They think these are magical tools.

Right.

There's a pricing algorithm Y. But what's to make it work you have to first put your own rules on top of that and then check I hope makes sense to us.

Absolutely makes sense. Especially from, from a host who's used it. Absolutely makes sense. So anyway, coming back to you now on there is there metrics that every host out there really should be measuring because I Know you love numbers. I know. Is the numbers guy, the. Is there metrics that each host should be measuring and should they be measuring it from the first unit? You know the guys who are doing it as side hustles right up to when they run it as a business. And yeah. What is, what is your thoughts around that? Should there be more hosts using these measurements and is there specific sections of price labs that can help them with this?

Yeah. So one, it doesn't matter if you have one property or 10 or 100 or 1,000. Everybody should be measuring in some ways what they are doing. Right. There are two very common measures that, that I've seen and the things that you measure will change as depending on the scale. Right. If you have your own property, for example, you know very well exactly how many dates are available. What if you are blocking certain dates and things like that? If it's your second home, likely you're okay selling every night in the year on it, unless you're, you're going and staying there. One of the very common metrics that everybody loves to look at is occupancy rate, which is very straightforward. I have 31 days in July I sold say 25 of them were booked. So my occupancy rate is 25 by 31 times 100, whatever it comes out to be. And those percentages help you get a sense of okay, how, how, how well is my resource in some ways utilized. So like if you think about your home, in any given month, there are a fixed number of nights you can sell. Like so travel industry is different than a lot of other industries like manufactured goods. In some ways you can create more of something and then go sell it. So like if you sold a few things for too cheap, you make more of it and then realize there's a lot of demand and you can have the chance to find the right price nights on your home, you can't create duplicates of that. Like once you have sold it to somebody, you've kind of sold it. So while occupancy is a great measure to get a sense of like if you're 0% occupied for like the upcoming month, that tells you a lot that hey, maybe my prices were too high. But if you are heavily occupied, if you're 80% occupied for the next month, it's harder to tell whether it's a great thing or not. Because maybe you're 80% booked because your price was too cheap, a lot of demand was still there to come and you got sold early. What helps in such cases Is a metric. Revenue as a metric, when you have one property is perfectly fine to use. Because revenue is also in many ways what should matter to every vacation rental owners to say, okay, how much money am I making out of this? Doesn't matter if I'm 80% occupied or if I'm 40% occupied. If I made enough to cover whatever expenses I have and mortgage and enough for me to live by, then I'm fine with it. Once you get to a larger scale and when you're managing somebody else's properties, that's when you get into, okay, is revenue the right number? Because maybe last year we made $20,000 on these or pounds on these 10 homes in this month, and this year we made double of that. But maybe the number of homes you were managing has increased. Last year you were managing 20 and this year you're managing 30. So you have to think of a few more involved metrics. One of them is called revpar, essentially saying, don't look at total revenue, but look at revenue per unit per night or things like that. For somebody who has one property, just looking at revenue and occupancy is good enough. Like, those two will tell you enough.

I love that you've mentioned the, the story of if. All the time we hear hosts who say, hey, I'm 100% occupied. And my instant reaction is, you're too cheap. You know, you're not charging enough. Yeah. And you know, it's sometimes worn as a badge of honor. Whereas actually if you're that 80, 90% occupied, potentially you're selling it at the right level. Again, depending on the product. But.

On that one, very quickly, we see some, some folks who sign up with us where they are used to their entire next year's calendar being 80% full at the beginning of like any time. Like, if they join today, we see that, okay, 80% of the future years nights are already booked. And we look at the market data and we're like, that is not normal. Because in your market, half the bookings come within the last three months. So you must be selling very cheap if even more than three months out you have that booked. So, yeah, anybody who says, I'm 100% booked all the time is either doing it really well, like Tibo said, selling out for a high price, far out. And then figuring out how to fill the gaps and things like that, or potentially is selling too cheap. And very frequently it's the latter. I don't think anybody has mastered revenue management to the point of saying, yeah, I'm 100% booked and I'm making as much as I could.

Yeah, it's always more to discover, isn't there?

There is always, yeah.

The other metric that you mentioned there, which I didn't really know about till I got to about seven, eight properties, was RevPAR. It was an eye opener to for me because I used to think, well, am I comparing total revenue, am I comparing occupancy? But Revpar solves that problem where I can compare units to a degree, you know, against each other. So definitely one to, to check out. For anyone listening is, is, is Revital RevPAR.

And to the other question, Liam. So we, we provide dynamic pricing, but we also have, we call it portfolio analytics, but it's essentially a BI tool. So if you connect your property to price labs, even if you don't want to use dynamic pricing, the BI tool is free. So you can go and look at those kinds of metrics for your own portfolio. Look at seasonal trends within our product without using dynamic pricing if you want to.

That's really cool. So Thibaut, coming back to yourself, the one thing that you probably get to talk to a lot of hosts and the one thing that I sometimes hear people worried about for dynamic pricing or some of the worries and the objections, some of them say, you know, well, you know, it costs, which of course it does. I'd love to find out what your reply would be to the, the people who are worried about the cost of the software. But then also the. I hear a lot of people say, well, I'm worried that all of a sudden my rates are going to go up too high and, and they're worried about the perception of, of what their guests will feel like if, you know, if they've stayed with them before. What would be your advice to those hosts?

Sure, these are great questions indeed. And first I will talk of the cost of opportunity of not using the tool. Right. For example, of course we all love Book Direct and with my own properties, I want as many booking as possible. But I'm also on Airbnb and if you're listing your place on Airbnb right now, if you start listing with them by default, they have their smart pricing turned on. So many people don't realize that, but they are using, or Airbnb is making them use their own dynamic pricing tool, which is called smart pricing.

Right.

And what's interesting is that if you think about the goal of this tool, the goal of this tool in Airbnb is to make sure there's a lot of bookings happening right Because Airbnb is taking commission on that. So the goal of this dynamic tool basically is to make sure the price is not too high, is high enough so you get bookings and everybody's getting good revenues because they get the host fee. But it's not too high that people will not be booking. Right. So it does mean that probably the prices are lower. It would be if it was not determined by Airbnb's own interest here. So there's a cost opportunity. Just as I said, if you're just not using, for example, any tool, we talked about how you're missing out on demand spikes. But even if you're just using Airbnb's own tool, there's probably a cost opportunity here, too. So that's number one. Number two, what's interesting with price labs, actually, and again, that's why I was a client with a customer with them, is that the structure of the cars is actually the best value for money in the industry, in a sense that it's just. It starts, I think, around $19 if you have one listing, for example, and it goes down if you more listings, you add. But it does mean that it's a fixed flat fee. Right. It's not like the more bookings you get, the more booking make money we're making. Right. If you're successful, we're very happy. Still the same price, not taking more. So that's also something to realize here. It's a bit different. It's not like, again, a booking platform that would take a cut every time you have a booking. No, we're flat fee, you're successful, good for you. That's more money for you. I think you had another question around. Sorry, Another fear that users would have. What was it again?

Yeah, absolutely. So the other fear that users sometimes have is that they're worried that the prices will be too high. The perception from their previous guests will. That may worry them.

I think it's a great question. Right? It's a great question. So again, there's. There's several things to have in mind here. First, if you want to, you can always set up a maximum price. You know, if you want to right this in price labs, you could. It's very easy. You see the. You'll see your listing, you'll see this base price. You see minimum price. I will tell you, always set up a minimum price.

Right.

Never know why not. But if you really want to consider a maximum price, if you really want. You're afraid of stuff even to get started to see how it goes Right. But I would not encourage to do that because you may miss out again in Steven Spikes right now for your former guests, you could imagine maybe you have a special pricing for them in a sense that maybe you tell them to use. You have a special grade, the special pricing, you send them by email to them, let them know about this. But that's where you have to think about several things here. For example, are you in a market where people come back the following year? If not, for example, I have a property in Bali. It's a once lifetime destination. People who sold price last year will not be the same people who see a price next year. So I don't have the issue. Second, if people are really loyal to me, it's great. So maybe we have a special pricing. And you know what, if they book direct, you can tell me by email and a book they have this special price, why not I communicate to them and then I would block those dates in my pms, for example, in my tool and then that automatically those days will be blocked off in price labs and no issue for them. Right. So it really, really depends here. And, but there's, there's indeed in the end it's also your interest, right, as a host to make the most as much money as possible. Because also what you can do in the end. So maybe at times be lower than you used to be. For example, you know, in the coming next two weeks you have, you don't have any bookings, maybe the tool is going to tell you, hey, you have to lower your price because you really last minute, you're always a bit too high. In this case, if you have people who booked with you last year and rebook now, last minute, they will have a lower price. So it's, it's also, you know, this is what you know, I would say the rules of like the demand and supply are so of course you have to take care of your past guests, make sure that whether it's really, is it really important your market, if you have a loyalty program, use your program. The Buddha is very important. But as well, you know, don't miss out on spikes and prices can go up and also can go down.

Right.

I completely agree with you with the, like you say, just making sure you're making the most of those high peaks is just so important because as Anurag said, the, the amount of stock that you have, you don't get that time back, you don't get those nights back.

And I understand, I mean whenever we do, somebody in my team called Ishani, she Does customer testimonials, right? And a lot of time we have, we hear people saying how uncomfortable they were or unsure they were when so how high the price could go. And I get that, right? It's like you're like really? And sometimes. Yeah, yep. Really. And it's like half you don't believe. And then you're like, oh my God, what did I do all these years not thinking about this? For example, I know another island. We have a property with a big sailing regatta. The whole island, usually everybody's coordinated. The end season, the high season ends on the same day for everybody on the island. It's probably something like this in some markets, right? But this selling regatta happens a week later. So a lot of demand for that. But everybody lowers their price. That's crazy. Thanks to price, I've always been able to improve my pricing there and just doubling my revenues for that week, which just makes sense. So I'm not betraying anyone. It's just like this. People can book elsewhere, right? If they want to.

One thing that we always say in Boostly is get comfortable being uncomfortable. And that's how you know you're growing as, as a host and as a person in general. And one of the things that it done for me is it reset the kind of level that I thought the, the price should be for. You know, using price labs and also with the extra revenue I could put that back into guest experience. So we bought like a drinks fridge for one of them. We improved our guest books and, and things like that. So that's the other thing from a host point of view is that you can then reinvest in your unit and actually improve the experience for your guests. Because at the end of the day, if the cash flow is king and if you've not got enough cash flow to do the things you want to do to keep that guest experience where you want to then you know, it's a downward spiral at that stage, which is where having price revenue management really comes in something.

So sorry to interject something I heard on those lines actually from, from a customer is they, they saw something similar where it was an event they didn't know about and the prices went up like two or three times and somebody booked it and then they were worried that okay, like what do we do? Like they might be disappointed because you know, it's, It's a nice 2 bedroom but it's is it worth 3x the price I usually sell at? And somebody else in their community suggested that go all out on like put a Nice bottle of wine out, get flowers ordered, do whatever you want. Like if you made 400 extra bucks and you're, you're worried about what would the guests say? Put 100 bucks in and reinvest it back in their stay like nothing else and then see what happens. And of course, like they get got a glowing review about like how good the hospitality was and everything else. Right. So like you can do some things like this as well when, when you get those one off bookings where something big is happening and you end up charging more, put it back right in that state.

So adding value to it is absolutely key. So Anurag, sticking with yourself, I'd love to know a little bit more about the history of Price Labs. Obviously, you know, if you can give us just a brief overview of, of how price labs came around. And also was there a wow moment where you went, you know what? This is something which we're going to do. This is what I want to solve this problem in the hospitality industry.

Yeah. So we started Price Labs in 2014 and early 2014, I think it was Jan or Feb. My co founder Richie was studying at Northwestern University in Chicago, and I used to work in Chicago for United Airlines doing the same thing, pricing and revenue management algorithms there. And we had known each other for about 10 years at that point. We were together in undergrad. So he, for the summer, he was planning on listing his spare bedroom, his roommate spare bedroom on Airbnb. And as he was going through the process, he's like, airbnb does, doesn't give any indication. So this is 2014. Airbnb didn't have smart pricing and things like that. It's travel, it's fixed resources. Like, I only have three months of this room to sell. I want to make sure I'm selling it at the right price. Like, how do I do this? And he and I started talking. He's like, hey, if airlines can do it, why shouldn't it exist in short term rentals? Right? And we're like, okay, that argument makes sense. It should exist. When we started off on how do we make this happen, the biggest challenge at that point was like airlines, hotels, they all have like troves of their own data. And a lot of Airbnb hosts if you have one property or a lot of like, if you are not even on, like at that time, Airbnb wasn't as big. Like if you're on vacation rental owner with one property, that, that is not enough data for anybody to be able to say, hey, something big is happening on, like September 15th, let's increase prices. Because if you have one property, it's either booked or not booked. Once it's booked, you can't do anything. And if it's not booked, how do you tell there is a lot. There's high demand, right? So we started. Then we found our third co founder, who was an engineer, thankfully, to start gathering all of this data, to start scraping different OTAs to say, hey, what's available? What's selling at what price? And then we built out sort of a system to say, okay, when a lot of things are selling fast, we increase prices. When they are not, we decrease prices. And that was sort of the first version of it. We put it out, learned a lot from the feedback we got from folks in Chicago who tried it. In 2016, we sort of did a relaunch. By then we had figured out a lot of things, like, seasonality is important in this industry. Like day of week adjustments are important. Events and holidays are. And booking window, like, how far out it is, it's important. So, like, by then, we had figured out a lot of these things and we put it all in into our algorithm. But even then, it was just Airbnb at that point. And this is again, feedback we kept getting from people to say, like, hey, Airbnb is a slice of the industry. It is not the industry. If you want to do something in this industry on pricing, you need to hook up with property management systems. And at that time, we had no clue what these meant. So we started talking to a few, few, like, customers who were using us to see recommendations and then plug them into their property management system. Told us, hey, just integrated with my property management system. And customers made those introductions for us. Started off there, been on a journey to figure out what this industry is about. I think now we integrate with about 90 property management systems, and there are so many more that we don't integrate with. It's a vast, vast industry. So, yeah, it's been like that constant figuring out, how does this work? Like, first figuring out how to get data, then figuring out what to do with the data, then figuring out how do we get the price recommendations into the property management systems. All of this has been sort of a lot of small aha moments along the way, but it's been fun.

Yeah, I love that. I love the fact that you saw, you know, in another industry and go, hey, why? Why doesn't that already exist? And then you've gone out and created it. How does it feel helping many people? You know, it must so then how many active, I guess users are there of Price Labs and how does it feel helping so many people?

Yeah, so we have about 20,000 customers and amongst all of them there are about 160,000 properties that use Price Labs. Feels great. Feels also like very. You want to make sure we are doing everything we can to keep improving the product. So like it's also joy and responsibility hand in hand in some ways. So. So yeah, it generally feels good.

That's brilliant. That's brilliant. So I really get a sense of, of really where Price Labs has come from and the, you know, sort of the aha moments like you say across, across the way. Thibaut, I'd love to know a little bit more about how you came to be part of Price Labs. And of course you've got your awesome sort of new site, the Rental Scale up as as well, haven't you? As. So I'd love to know more about yourself for the audience.

Yeah, exciting. I mean excited. I'm excited and exactly. Sorry, it's a bit, I mean under the weather today so I'm trying to find my words.

Thank you, thank you for joining us.

No, it's okay. Get a 2 year old managed to get me sick after trying for a whole week. The coughing work. Yeah. So. Well, yeah, I've been blogging about the industry for a while first under the name rentalpreneurs and the rental scale up. And Rental Scale up really started growing two years ago and talking about what the big players are doing in the industry like Airbnb booking or sharing data about what's happening in the U.S. what's happening in Europe and talking about new players for example, or any kind of new tech really that people should know about. So we have a weekly newsletter that's free, it's out every Wednesday and basically we, you know, we help people understand what's happening in industry and we have a voice so we try to just say okay, that's what's happening. And so quite a few times we break news actually. Okay, that's what's happening. That's what we think it means for, for you guys and that's what we think you should be doing. So we try to not just be like reporting but also maybe try to give advice because obviously you know, as we host ourselves we say try to make sense of stuff. And for some reason still unknown to me, Richie and Rag and Sana, the co founders of Price Lab liked Rental Scale Up. So yeah, we joined the rentals. We joined the Price Lab family in August 2022. I think what's really good here is that that basically enables me, for example, to scale up, to have access to all the market dashboards. So Bucket Dashboard is a product in Price Labs where basically you can enter an address and find all kind of like data around the market, you know, number of listings and you can divide up by, you know, I want to see only data for two bedroom places and data trends, booking pace, kind of things like this. So I can have this, for example, where I'm talking, imagine I want to write an article at France, so I want to write an article about a market somewhere. Suddenly I have access to real data and real trends thanks to Price Labs because they get that data from different sources from Airbnb, Verbal, their own sources. So it's unbelievable for me for the content, right. And for Price Lab also. It means that, for example, Price Lab now is the sponsor of every show we're doing or every content we have. It's also a way really to help people, again, understand what price Type is about. And it's good for people who have like one, two properties as well. People have like thousands of properties, right. They're going to use the tool differently, but in the end, the algorithm at the heart of it is the same. That's how it plays out. Rental, scale up and Price Labs.

I love, I love this, you know, sorry. And certainly we'll, we'll check you out and I'm sure people listening are going to come and check you out as well. The, the data is just so important, isn't it? And one of the features I absolutely love is the fact that as a host, you may not know where you're based on price can be. So you can use the, you know, sort of the selection, the, the, the tool which, where you can select your number of bedrooms, you can select whether it's high end, mid, you know, sort of budget, and it'll give you an idea of, of base price and like you say, you can dive into the analytics of it as well.

So yeah, it works also very important. Yeah. For, for, for horse like us, we always want to know. Okay, okay, that's. I know what's happening to me, but am I the only one? Am I crazy? What's happening in the market?

Right?

And suddenly you get this data. You can even like fine tune stuff and you can select some properties that you all want to have an eye on and see how they're doing, or have them in part of a set on which you're going to compare your own performance against theirs. So it's really, really useful. Again in Bali have a property that's very unique but I know a few places that are somewhat comparable. So it really involves me really to also fine tune on what mount properties compare against and see that in price labs. So I find it very, very, very powerful.

One of the things that we love to do is I mean there's so much more we could, we could talk about. I'd love to dive in like the integration there's so much. But as we get towards the end of these we love to just do a couple of quick fire questions just find out a little bit more about your and sticking with yourself to you Bo, you mentioned your properties in, in Bali.

Did you say correct?

Yeah.

And where, where is. So question number one is, is where is your favorite holiday destination?

So I have one property in Bali and then the other in the Caribbean because I actually live for quite a few years in the French Caribbean. So my favorite destination is going to be that island in the Caribbean. Yeah.

Nice. I like that. Anurag, what is your favorite or the most recent either of those piece of text that you, that you bought. So tech or app or tool?

Let me think about it. So one I'm wearing these. That, that's definitely one. But I used to have so much trouble with with webinars like this or video calls where I would be constantly holding my like the string mic next to my face so that I could be heard. I bought this webcam that sits on top of my monitor. The reason for that purchase was more because I have a laptop and people are always looking the side of my face and I got this as a surprise. It also has a built in mic which works 10 times better than anything else I had used before.

Nice.

And it's like a 20 camera with a built in mic and like this is amazing. Like yeah, like my last eight months have been tremendous because of that. I don't know if you wanted vacation rental tech or tech.

No, no, no. Any, any tech at all. What, what are the headphones? I always love to find out what the headphones that you use.

They are Samsung Galaxy Buds.

Nice. Nice. I just love finding out about tech and that sort of thing. So sticking with yourself and Reg, the next question quickfire is what is your favorite food?

Favorite food? I have to name one but I generally love Chinese food a lot and I'm saying I love Indian food and eat that all day but Chinese food is what I don't get to eat every day. So like if I'm, if I Have to go out or order in Chinese food.

Nice, Nice. And Thibaut, coming back to yourself, what's your. What is a compliment that you can remember receiving or the best compliment that you. That you've received?

I like what you write, I must say. It's like, because, you know, you write this, this newsletter, this content, right? And you send it out to the world and you have no idea. It's. It's scary. Like, is it relevant? Do I make sense? People get it. And then you go to a conference. For example, I was at VRMAN in the US A few weeks ago in the Price Last booth, and people see my name, like, oh, that's who you are. I love what you write. I'm like, wow, thanks. Because it does validate in a way what you've been doing. Which is, again, it is scary because in the end, you want to help people and you create this content. But, you know, the feedback loop is, you know, there's nothing better than, like, people telling you, like, yes, that's very helpful. Thank you.

Yeah, I love that.

I love that. And we always end with. With the same question, so we'll come to you first. Anurag.

What.

What is one mantra or motto that you like to live by?

So it's a quote by. I don't know if it's actually by him, but in popular media, it's attributed to Albert Einstein. And it says, make everything as simple as it can be, but no simpler. And the thought is essentially that when you think about solving a problem, you can create a very complicated solution to it and try to attack it that way. But if you truly try to get to the bottom of, like, hey, what is. What's the problem? There's often a simple solution potentially waiting that you should try to get to. And the second part says, but not any simpler, because sometimes it's not a simple solution. And then you shouldn't choose the incorrect simpler solution just because it's simpler. So that's kind of, in many ways, like, we try to do that Price Labs, especially on the data science team, to say, okay, when we have. When we want to predict something, there, there's. You can throw the kitchen sink at it. But then can we do it in a simpler way that's a lot more understandable and gives us good results. And we would pick the simpler any day.

It makes sense. I like that. I like that. Antivo. Same question to yourself. What mantra or motto do you live by? All right, I think.

I think I would say it's. Let me pronounce. It right. So independence is not a dogma, it's a result. And it's, it's, it's something I came across actually this year because I was difficult year and I, I talked with a coach actually, but, you know, a few things and I realized that a lot of decision I was making was like, oh, because I want to be independent. Or, or I thought that being independent, for example, meant a few things like, you know, if you have your own business, for example, or, or if you want to work, work remotely or all kind of things. Like if being independent for me meant a few things, that's, that's what it is. It was like a very strict definition and actually by doing this, following this very strict definition, I would end up being completely not independent. I would be depending on other things. So that's when talking to this coach is like, no, no, you are independent. That would be a result that would not be. It's like, no, it's not. It's not a few things you're doing, it's the result in the end you should be doing. So it's like focus more on the end result and if some things are not conducive to getting that result, change them. So, yeah, it was interesting for me.

That definitely resonates with me. There's a chap called Alex Harmozi who I follow and that reminds me of some advice that I've seen from him, which is not looking like you say, for the result, but look towards what degree does it move you closer towards that goal? You know, like imagine building a bridge across a ravine. Is it an extra brick in that ravine that you don't want the result instantly, because that's unlikely to. To happen. So. But does it bring you closer to it? And we should measure by, by degrees like that. So awesome. So in terms of, for everybody listening, we should mention just before we go that the book is going to be out December 2022. So depending on when you listen to this, you need to go and check out the book direct Blueprint. And you can do so by going to boostly.co.uk blueprint and depending on when you're listening, you can either pre register for the book or you can actually make the purchase there. And so thank you so much for, for joining me tonight. Anurag and Thibaut. That's superb to speak to and really find out about Price Labs. I've learned lots and I'm sure everybody else has as well. Is there any questions that I've missed or any final thoughts before we go, if we come to you first.

Not really, but, but to reiterate what you said, Liam, the book is out in December and a lot of us have put in significant amount of effort in writing it and bringing it. Very varied perspectives. So would love, would love to hear feedback similar to TiVo said we put in all this effort. Was it useful? Like we would love to know to see that feedback. But yeah, if there are any questions that we couldn't answer or you had or anybody else had that they want answered, feel free to reach out to us. Email is usually the best way. I'm at anuragricricelabs co and if not me, you can always go to our website. There's a chat button and leave your question there and we'll get back to it as well.

Awesome. And we should mention as well the, the tips that you share in your chapter. I mean first of all, there's, you know, there's a link at the end of the chapter to find out more as well. But there's very actionable advice and certainly the I'll leave it as a, as a cliffhanger for people listening. But you really changed the way I think about OTAs and direct bookings in terms of how I cost things up. And it's such an important bit of, bit of information in there. Thibaut, how can the listeners get in touch with you? And is there any final thoughts before we go?

Sure thing. Again, first, yeah, thanks for having us. And well, rentalscaleup.com is, is where the website is and you can contact me there. Obviously I also haven't dressed at Price Labs but it's. I would have to spit out my first name and last name and it's going to be a torture for people listening. It's too complicated. Just go to basically rentalscaleup.com and contact I will be there. I could either contact me for Price Labs or for Rentals cup. I'd be happy to answer that. And also something to I want to mention indeed that there's a free trial. People will try yours out for at least 30 days. So just to give an idea how things would be and it can even like try out put your listing and use your own data to see how prices would be without having to push those prices to Airbnb or to booking to anything. So you can really do this in, in, in, in private box. It's safe but you can see things for yourself. I think it's very, very important as well. I think that's the best tip I can give for people who are regardless of the tools. Right. One Make a decision. Want to make a big decision like this? Should I be straight? Should I try starting using this, you know, put your a link to one of your listings, check out the price predictions for yourself, tweak things a bit and you don't have to already push the prices. Just you know, learn by doing and if you're comfortable, do it or reach out to us if you have doubts.

I love that it's about taking action, isn't it? And I'm sure there's going to be a lot of people off the back of this podcast and the book who, who come to guys because it's helped me and it's one of the few things which I say it's a no brainer, you know, it really is something which hosts should get involved with. So thank you very much guys. Been an absolute pleasure having you on. Apologies we've run slightly over time, it's been a slightly longer one than we planned. But really appreciate your time and I also appreciate the guests and the people listening to this podcast. I know there's lots of places you can put your attention. I really appreciate you spending it here on the booster podcast. So that's it from us. Thank you very much and goodbye. We'll see you on the next one.

Thank you so much for checking out today's podcast episode. Now before you head and go anywhere else before you click to the next episode, before you do that, do me one big favor and go check out boostly.co.uk trust IPRAC are the sponsors of all of the Boostly content. And the reason why I work with them and the reason why we spread the message of IPRAC is that when a host or a company is looking to get more into diary bookings, the main question they have is around trust. As in will a guest trust that I am a true and real business? Well, IPRAC take care of all of that and they've got a special offer that is only available to Boostly people. But to do that you need to go to boostly which is B O-O-S-T-L-Y.co.uk trust you can find out all the information there. You can book in a demo, book in a call and then you will get your super special offer that is only available to Boostly peoples. Thank you again for tuning in. Do go check out Iprac. We'll be back again very shortly with another podcast episode, but until then we'll see you all very soon. Take care.