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Customer Stories > How Tuparent Replaced Gut-Feel Pricing With PriceLabs' Market Data
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How Tuparent Replaced Gut-Feel Pricing With PriceLabs' Market Data

Executive Summary

Ismo Nurmela runs Tuparent, a two-person short-term rental company in Oulu, Finland. Together with his colleague Jarmo, he manages roughly half of nearly 100 properties, with two partner companies taking care of the others. Most properties sit in the ski centers of northern Finland, plus city apartments. Pricing by instinct worked for a handful of properties. It stopped working as the portfolio grew across more channels and more markets.

Since late 2021, PriceLabs has been Tuparent's pricing engine, working nowadays alongside Hostaway. Neighborhood Data and the Hotel Rate Shopper show Ismo whether a property is priced right for its market, and event-driven price moves arrive without anyone watching calendars.

About Tuparent

Tuparent is led by Ismo, who has worked in short-term rentals since 2008, and his colleague Jarmo. The company co-hosts, sets dynamic pricing and consults for property owners. Ismo and Jarmo also run the Lyhytvuokraus.fi brand, where most of Tuparent's leads come from. Most properties sit in the ski centers of Ruka, Levi, Ylläs and Syöte, where the busy season runs from December to the end of March. The rest are city apartments, with two partners covering southern Finland.

Hirsilampi Apartments in Ruka is one of them: an apartment complex with six units of about 70 m², each with its own sauna and all under Tuparent's co-host service. Tuparent also recently began pricing Ounasloma, a family-run resort of 13 cottages on Lake Ounasjärvi in Hetta, Enontekiö.

“We are data nerds, we like to get the data from these properties and that's our core business.” – Ismo Nurmela, CEO, Tuparent

Challenges Before PriceLabs

Tuparent started by pricing by hand on a local Finnish cottage-rental site. Three things got in the way as the business grew:

  • Growth had flattened. After a couple of years on that one site, the business was stable but not growing.
  • Pricing got complicated as channels multiplied. Moving to the major OTAs opened up more demand, and made rates harder to manage by gut feeling.
  • Events are hard to follow by hand. Ski centers and cities host events that move demand. Following them across dozens of properties was not realistic.
“We realized that this is getting too complex for us to manage by ourselves. The manual pricing, manual optimization just by gut feeling wasn't necessarily the best way of doing it.” – Ismo Nurmela

PriceLabs as a Solution

Tuparent adopted PriceLabs at the end of 2021, first alongside its original PMS. When the portfolio entered its growth period, the team changed PMS once, to Hostaway, and the two have run together since. Ismo describes the pairing as a professional PMS and a professional pricing system that work together smoothly and robustly.

Key features that made a difference:

  • Neighborhood Data. One curve shows how a property sits against its competitors across the season. It tells him whether a pricing profile is underpriced or overpriced for the market, and whether the bookings already in the calendar fall in the periods he is aiming for.
  • Event-driven price moves. When an event is announced in a ski center or city, Ismo sees the price already moving. PriceLabs picks up the demand shift and adjusts rates, while Ismo keeps control through the rules he sets for each property.
  • Hotel Rate Shopper. City guests compare short-term rentals with hotels, so Ismo checks nearby hotel rates for his city apartments. He uses the same view for Ounasloma, where the area has few short-term rentals and several hotels.
  • The right market data for each property. Some properties run like hotels but sit among short-term rentals, so PriceLabs draws on those rentals, not just hotels. Others are short-term rentals that mainly compete with nearby hotels, so PriceLabs brings in hotel data to shape price recommendations. Each is priced against the competitors guests actually compare it with.
“When I open PriceLabs, I go to Neighborhood Data, because I want to make sure that the pricing profile is according to the market and not underpriced or overpriced.”
– Ismo Nurmela

Results

Ismo points to these changes since PriceLabs became part of Tuparent's day-to-day:

  • Increased revenue: Tuparent achieved an average of 21% revenue improvement between 1 Apr 2025 – 31 Mar 2026.
  • Time back on event tracking. Event-driven price moves arrive on their own, so nobody has to follow event calendars across the portfolio.
  • Confidence in each price. Neighborhood Data and Hotel Rate Shopper give Ismo a quick check that prices match the market before he moves on to anything else.
  • Single dashboard across ski centers and cities. Ski-area apartments and city properties run on the same PriceLabs setup, with hotel rate data added where it fits.
“With tools like PriceLabs, we realize that it is reacting to those events automatically. That is a lot of good time saving, and it also gives us the confidence that this is the way to go.” – Ismo Nurmela

Looking Ahead

Ismo's focus is on where revenue management goes next. Today he fits a different set of rules to each property, based on location, room mix and positioning from luxury to budget, which means a lot of adjusting of parameters. He sees PriceLabs' data as the right base for something more guided.

His wish list is clear: describe a property, get an analysis of how it performs against the market, receive suggested adjustments, then get a follow-up a few weeks later on what worked and what to try next.

“In the near future, I hope we can get more data from this, which is more understandable as a user. And it gives me more tools so that I can type in, okay, this is my property. Give me the analysis of the market, how it performs against the market. What kind of adjustments should I do with this? And then it gives me recommendations.” – Ismo Nurmela