Unveiling the Improved Hotel Price Tracker and Exploring Effective Competitor Benchmarking in PriceLabs
A hotel price tracker shows you what nearby hotels charge, night by night, so you never price in the dark. This guide covers why benchmarking matters even if you run a boutique property or short-term rental, how to build a comp set that actually reflects your competition, and how PriceLabs' Hotel Data tab turns that tracked data into automatic pricing decisions. By the end, you will know exactly how to read competitor rates and turn them into higher occupancy and RevPAR.
What’s happening: A third tab is now available on the Review Prices view.
Our PriceLabs team is happy to announce that you have a new section to help you make informed pricing decisions and stay competitive in the market: the Hotel Data tab. This new feature is available on the listing page alongside the Calendar and Neighborhood Data tabs.
To access these tabs, navigate to the Pricing Dashboard and select a specific listing. Then, click the "Review Prices" button to access the Calendar, Neighborhood Data, and Hotel Data tabs.
This month, we're introducing the Hotel Data tab, a new section displaying an improved product feature called the Hotel Price Tracker. It is an excellent occasion for us to step back and discuss why you should care about benchmarking your peers, the local market, and even hotels (even if you are a short-term rental manager). So, we'll talk about benchmarking, creating sets of comparable properties, tracking short-term rental properties with our Neighborhood Data, and tracking other property types in your local market, such as hotels, in the Hotel Data tab.
Bonus: We've also added new charts to our Pacing Reports. You will find details toward the end of the article.
Calendar Tab: Unchanged
The Calendar tab remains unchanged and displays a monthly calendar with the recommended prices for each night.
Neighborhood Data Tab: Focus on Short-Term Rentals
The Neighborhood Data tab still displays data from short-term rentals in the immediate area of your listing. However, we have moved the data about local hotels to the new Hotel Data tab.
Hotel Data Tab: An Improved Hotel Price Tracker
The new Hotel Data tab presents a new location for the Hotel Price Tracker and offers significant improvements. These include showing hotel prices based on different lengths of stay and the ability to view hotels on a map with star ratings.
With this powerful new analysis and tracking section, you can access even more valuable data to make informed pricing decisions and stay competitive. You will find further details about the Hotel Data tab in the remainder of this section.
How PriceLabs helps: The Hotel Data tab's hotel price tracker connects straight into PriceLabs' dynamic pricing engine. You can set your baseline rate off local hotel data and let Last-Minute and Far-Out Pricing Adjustments handle the rest automatically.
Why Effective Benchmarking Techniques Are Crucial for Optimizing Your Pricing Strategy
Benchmarking your hotel against competitors is not just about knowing who else is in town. It is about understanding your property's relative value and adapting your pricing strategically. In the dynamic and competitive world of short-term rentals and independent hotels, owners and managers like you must understand and leverage benchmarking principles to make informed decisions and stay ahead. By implementing these principles, you can optimize your property's performance, revenues, and overall success in the market.
1.1 Key Principles of Benchmarking for Strategic Pricing
Benchmarking is a critical process that enables you to evaluate your property's performance by comparing it with other properties in your local and hyper-local market. Understanding how well your property is doing in relation to competitors is essential for several reasons:
- Identifying strengths and weaknesses: Benchmarking helps you determine areas where your property excels or underperforms compared to others. By recognizing these strengths and weaknesses, you can make targeted improvements to your property and its offerings.
- Staying competitive: Keeping track of competitor performance allows you to stay updated on market trends and ensures that you maintain a competitive edge. Adjusting your strategies based on this information can help you attract more guests and improve your property's overall performance.
- Learning from best practices: By analyzing your competitors' strategies and successes, you can identify best practices and innovative ideas to incorporate into your property's management and marketing efforts.
- Setting realistic goals and expectations: Benchmarking provides a realistic perspective on your property's performance, which can help you set achievable goals and expectations for future growth and improvement.
- Optimizing pricing strategy: Comparing your property's pricing with competitors can help you identify whether you charge too much or too little. Adjusting your pricing strategy based on this information can increase bookings and revenue.
To effectively benchmark, you need to create a comp set, or a group of properties similar to yours in terms of location, size, amenities, and target market.
1.2 Creating Competitive Sets in the Context of Short-Term Rentals
"Comp sets" is short for "competitive sets." These are groups of properties similar to yours that you can use to compare your property's performance. Creating comp sets involves selecting specific criteria to filter properties, generating a list of potential competitors, and then including or excluding properties to form a well-defined group.
You can create comp sets for short-term rentals using various tools and platforms that offer filtering options based on location, property type, size, amenities, and other relevant factors. It helps you discover local competitors that closely match your property's characteristics.
Creating comp sets has several advantages:
- Discovering local competitors: Comp sets help you identify other properties in your area that are similar to yours and target the same market, so you understand your competitive landscape and make better-informed decisions about positioning and strategy.
- Tracking performance: Once you have created a comp set, you can track the performance of these properties over time. It enables you to monitor how well your property is doing compared to others in the group and identify trends that may impact your business.
- Customization: Creating comp sets allows you to include only properties that are truly comparable to your own, ensuring that the performance data you track is relevant and meaningful.
- Benchmarking: Comp sets enable you to measure your property's performance against that of similar properties, helping you identify where your property is underperforming and make targeted improvements.
How PriceLabs helps: Use PriceLabs' Custom Comp Sets feature inside the Hotel Data tab to build tailored competitor groups, filtered by star rating, amenities, and geographic radius, so your benchmarking data stays meaningful and actionable.
1.3 Why Looking at Hotel Data Makes Sense, Even for Short-Term Rental Managers
A key aspect of good benchmarking is taking a step back and considering the relevant market definition from your guests' perspective. For instance, if you own a luxury one-bedroom villa that offers concierge services, your competition will likely include five-star hotels in your area.
In some markets, businesses offering short-term accommodations, such as apartments or aparthotels, might compete directly with nearby hotels. These businesses want to know how hotel prices change in their area, as hotel owners might have more information about local events or busy times. Additionally, some of PriceLabs' customers own hotels and find this information helpful.
As a short-term rental manager, incorporating hotel data into your analysis can enhance your pricing strategy in several ways:
- Understand pricing trends: By analyzing hotel pricing trends in your area, you can identify patterns that may impact your rental pricing. If hotel prices tend to increase during a specific period, consider adjusting your rental rates to match the demand.
- Identify high-demand periods: Hotel occupancy rates can give you a good idea of when your area is experiencing high demand. Use this information to adjust minimum length of stay requirements and pricing during these periods to maximize revenue.
- Determine off-peak discounts: By analyzing hotel data during off-peak seasons, you can determine the appropriate level of discounting for your rental to attract bookings while maintaining profitability.
- Assess local events and their impact: Hotel data can provide insights into the impact of local events on accommodations, helping you adjust pricing and length of stay requirements to maximize bookings and revenue.
- Monitor changes in the market: Keeping an eye on hotel data can help you stay informed about changes such as new hotel openings or closures, which might affect demand for rentals in your area.
By considering data from various property types, including hotels, you gain valuable insights into your local market, allowing you to make informed pricing decisions and stay competitive.
Benchmarking Hyper-Local Short-Term Rental Competition with the Neighborhood Data Tab
This section provides a quick overview of how the Neighborhood Data tab can help you stay updated on your local market and make well-informed pricing decisions for your short-term rental.
The Compare Competitor Calendar feature, an invaluable tool within the Neighborhood Data tab, lets you directly compare your pricing and availability with up to 10 specific listings in your neighborhood. By selecting the listings and clicking the "Get Calendar" button, you can view your competitors' rates and adjust your pricing strategy accordingly.
The Neighborhood Data tab offers two data sources for analysis: Nearby Listings and Market Dashboard. These sources help you understand your relative positioning in the immediate vicinity and across a broader range of properties, capturing a more extensive market snapshot.
- Nearby Listings compares your listing to similar properties in the immediate area, helping you determine the average price for your location and make necessary rate adjustments.
- Market Dashboard allows you to benchmark against a customized market. You must create a Market Dashboard and import this market view with the Neighborhood Data tab to compare against a broader, tailored competitive set.
In summary, the Neighborhood Data tab equips you with vital information on local market trends, competitor pricing, and occupancy rates, empowering you to make well-informed pricing decisions and maintain competitiveness in the market.
How to Track Hotel Prices in Your Local Market Competition with the Hotel Data Tab
PriceLabs' Hotel Data tab is a powerful tool designed to help short-term rental managers and independent hoteliers stay competitive in their local market by tracking their competition's pricing and length-of-stay strategies. While the tab is named Hotel Data, it contains valuable data for other property types such as bed and breakfasts, inns, serviced apartments, boutique hotels, and camping grounds.
Walkthrough: PriceLabs' Hotel Data Tab
PriceLabs' Hotel Data tab offers two key sections to help analyze your competition: the Hotel Tracker and the Map View. These sections provide essential data insights into nearby hotels' pricing strategies, location, and star ratings.
Hotel Tracker: Analyzing Nearby Competing Hotels to Maximize Revenue
This feature, located within the Hotel Data tab, is designed to help you stay competitive in your market by providing valuable data on nearby competing hotels. The Hotel Tracker feature has three components:
1. Select Hotels
This feature lets you select up to 350 hotels in your neighborhood to compare with your listing. You can see the nightly rates for each hotel and adjust your pricing strategy accordingly.
2. Length of Stay Filter
The LOS (Length of Stay) filter in the Hotel Data tab allows you to understand how nearby competing hotels price their accommodations based on the length of stay. For example, if the LOS filter shows that a hotel offers a discount for a minimum stay of three nights, consider offering a similar discount for bookings of three nights or more. On the other hand, if a competing hotel charges a premium for shorter stays, you could offer better value for guests who stay fewer nights.
Additionally, the LOS filter can help you determine minimum stay requirements for nearby hotels. If many hotels in the area require a minimum stay of three nights, you may want to adjust your own minimum stay requirement to match or exceed that standard.
How PriceLabs helps: Pair LOS filter insights with Minimum Stay Rules to automatically tighten or relax your minimum nights based on what competing hotels are doing around you.
3. The Table & Graph View
The Table & Graph View in the Hotel Data tab is essential for analyzing your pricing strategy and comparing your position with nearby competing hotels.
The Table View displays the nightly rates of selected hotels for comparison. Your listing's prices are highlighted in bold, while unavailable dates are crossed out and greyed. We use NB if the date is Not Bookable for the selected Length of Stay and rates are available for a different Length of Stay. We use NA if rates are Not Available for any length of stay.
By clicking on a hotel name in the table, a link takes you to the hotel's Booking.com page. The Graph View displays the pricing position of your property relative to nearby competing hotels over time. The black line represents the recommended price for your property by PriceLabs. The corresponding hotel line on the graph can be hidden or shown by clicking on a hotel name in the legend.
You can use this information to adjust your pricing strategy. For example, lower your prices if they are consistently higher than nearby hotels, or raise them if your prices are lower. The Table & Graph View can also help identify patterns in pricing strategies among nearby hotels, which can inform your own pricing strategy.
Map View: Visualize Nearby Hotels
The Hotel Data tab provides a unique feature called Map View. It visually represents nearby hotels in your neighborhood, using a color-coding system based on the star ratings shown on Booking.com to differentiate the hotels.
With the ability to zoom in and hover over each bubble to see the star rating, this feature offers a quick and easy way for short-term rental managers and independent hoteliers to understand the competitive landscape of their area.
Your Questions About PriceLabs' Hotel Data Tab
From where does PriceLabs source its hotel data? We obtain hotel data from Booking.com, the largest accommodation provider worldwide. PriceLabs retrieves information from Booking.com, such as hotel names, locations, rates, calendar availability, and star ratings.
Does the hotel data affect the price recommendations provided by PriceLabs? The impact of hotel data on PriceLabs' pricing recommendations can vary depending on the market and circumstances. In some markets, hotel trends can predict short-term rental demand, so we incorporate relevant hotel data into our
pricing algorithms. When rental data alone doesn't show demand signals for events many months out, we may use hotel data as an additional indicator.
Comp Set Selection Criteria at a Glance
Refined Pacing Report Tab: Introducing New Data Points & Comparative Metrics
We are excited to announce the latest improvements to our Pacing Report tab launched just last month. These updates will help you better understand your property's performance and make informed decisions.
In the "Pacing" section of the Pacing Reports, we have introduced additional data points and curves, providing a more comprehensive and insightful analysis. Here's what's new:
How PriceLabs helps: The enhanced Report Builder and Portfolio Analytics let you build custom reports that stack your hotel's [RevPAR] performance against your comp set and market benchmarks, all in one view.
Introducing the Hotel Data tab and the enhancements to the Pacing Reports provide PriceLabs users with a comprehensive set of tools to make well-informed pricing decisions and maintain a competitive edge in the market. These features offer valuable insights into nearby hotels and local short-term rental market trends and enable you to analyze your property's performance more effectively. By leveraging these tools, you can optimize your pricing strategies, maximize revenue, and stay ahead of the competition.
Way Forward
A hotel price tracker only pays off when you act on what it shows you. Start by building an honest comp set, check the Hotel Data tab regularly for rate and length-of-stay shifts, and let automation handle the repetitive adjustments so you can focus on guest experience. If you have not compared your own [Comp Sets] approach against your true local competition yet, that is the fastest next step toward higher occupancy and stronger [RevPAR].
FAQs
What is a hotel price tracker and how does it work?
A hotel price tracker monitors competitor hotel rates in your local market in real time. It collects data on different stay durations, room types, and dates, helping you see how your prices compare and adjust your rates to stay competitive.
Why should I include hotels in my competitor benchmarking?
Hotels often share guests with short-term rentals and boutique properties, especially in overlapping markets. Monitoring their pricing trends reveals demand patterns and helps you set prices that align with guest expectations, maximizing occupancy and revenue.
How do I create an accurate competitor set for benchmarking?
Choose hotels similar to yours by considering location, star rating, room types, and guest segments. Clean comp sets produce more relevant insights to guide your pricing and marketing decisions.
Can a hotel price tracker help with minimum stay policies?
Yes. Tracking how hotel rates vary by length of stay can inform your [Minimum Stay Rules], optimizing nights booked and reducing gaps in your calendar.
How does PriceLabs' Hotel Data tab improve my pricing decisions?
It offers detailed, segmented pricing data alongside mapping and competitive insights that feed directly into dynamic pricing automation, leading to smarter, faster rate changes based on actual market conditions.
