4 Vacation Rental Pricing Strategies to help you maximize your occupancy rates

The first strategy that John recommends is to approach your portfolio’s rates through expiring inventory first. Though this strategy is rudimentary (you may have already been doing this!) It’s great to ensure your team is intentional about regularly doing it. Use this strategy to look forward into your last-minute booking window, balanced with the value of your product and your risk tolerance, to view in a 1-week / 2-week / 30-day window and position the nights to sell for maximum occupancy. Prioritize the “expiration” date, the final booking availability date before no occupancy status. Set a weekly schedule for last-minute rate adjustments to maximize occupancy and avoid lost revenue.  

Making active adjustments can help deliver that occupancy you need and will always be worth more than a vacancy (as a filled rental is always better than no revenue!) or the minor amount that can be captured by optimizing ADR in the short window. The more this strategy is used, the better off you’ll be to create a standard value and date to create a last-minute booking window approach.  

As far as vacation rental pricing optimization strategies are concerned, this can be the most dependent on seasons, unit details, and other unique aspects. Of course, in low seasons, you may want to expand your expiring inventory timeframe to recognize the decreased demand. Larger homes, too, may have larger windows given the differing audience from smaller units. Because optimizing ADR in this window has limited benefit compared to other optimization areas, it’s better to be heavy handed with adjustments on expiring inventory strategy and invest rates management time elsewhere. 

• Tip: Escapia’s Flex Reporting tool can help you identify these windows for expiring inventory windows to help you get “heads in beds” without sacrificing too much time! Establish a recurring reporting dashboard to see how much value you can get from maximizing occupancy within last-minute time frames.

Another strategy that many vacation rental property management companies are likely using without knowing it’s a dedicated strategy is New Booking Analysis. You’ll review your new reservations as they come in to spot check Dates, Rates and overall Booking count. Alongside longer-term strategies, this will perform as a spot check on your incoming reservations to make sure you aren’t missing anything that may indicate a deeper dive is required elsewhere. 

Dedicate a few minutes every day and check across your main vacation rental pricing factors (occupancy, seasons, ADR, etc.) as an indicator of what to investigate in your more weekly reporting! This is particularly valuable if you’re using a dynamic vacation rental pricing tool to ensure that the rates offered are in line with what you would expect. Keep a monitor of sales pacing as you would expect, and you can be reassured that your pricing strategy is proceeding as expected! 

• Tip: Escapia’s Market Rates dynamic vacation rental pricing tool can be a powerful support in assuring your pricing strategy is in similar swings to your market. Powered by billions of first-party Vrbo vacation rental pricing data points, you’ll receive suggestions on unit pricing based on environmental conditions!

Pacing analysis is the first strategy that can be performed across different time frames, and as you do your reporting, you’ll be looking at your bookings rather than focusing on date of sale. This strategy helps you anticipate vacancies and adjust rates accordingly.  

The key to this report lies in identifying where your reservations are landing – will you end up having accidental vacancies approaching if your customers are taking a future booking? This will help optimize specific dates as well instead of specific units, as consumer trends will tell you certain dates are valuable vacation rental pricing factors. 

This analysis framework will allow you to quickly observe vacancies or dates with high sales and occupancy to optimize the revenue. This will also allow for extremely targeted vacation rental pricing strategies to only on dates that need optimization, rather than entire time periods. John at Wheelhouse recommends you aim to use this strategy once a week to undertake. 

This vacation rental pricing strategy works especially well with historical data. If you see a specific time frame lacking comparable to previous years (or even days of the week on a month-to-month analysis) you can adjust as needed! John also suggests reviewing this data based on occupancy as opposed to revenue – while revenue can represent your total profit, it can also be swayed by several high-value bookings, which means the rest of your portfolio can go unnoticed. 

This can also help you identify things in your sales environment that may have also gone by your attention! Flagging specific days means outside factors may be big vacation rental pricing factors – concerts, conferences, and other important events may influence your rates, especially if you use a dynamic vacation rental pricing tool. 

• Tip: Picked up some insights and looking to apply them to your portfolio? Escapia’s Rates Management tool has plenty of ways to improve performance based on outside (and internal!) factors, like length-of-stay discounts, last-minute booking discounts, coupons, seasonal pricing, and more!

Bottoms Up strategy is a powerful weekly strategy for bringing your entire portfolio’s performance up! As opposed to pacing analysis, where you make optimizations based on the date, with Bottom Up you’ll sort your listings according to their performance on a factor, identify your lowest performers, and make changes to move them up. Over the course of the year as you identify new low hanging fruit per week, your vacation rental pricing strategy will touch all of your portfolio. 

Pull reports based on any number of factors (occupancy, RevPAR, revenue, etc.) and list down which units should undergo rates adjustment. As time is always limited, those underperforming over time may have something that needs particular attention, and your adjustments will hit the units where you can get the maximum impact. This strategy does require the most working with owners as you adjust on a unit per unit basis. 

This can also help you identify specific trends to start with. For instance, specific unit issues can represent historical rate issues, check if listings were live and bookable, and see if listing reviews may be unequal across the portfolio so you can focus your attention on actions that matter. Overlaying additional data can only unlock deeper insights!  

• Tip: Escapia’s Flex Reporting tool allows for a multi-layered deep dive to find issues with specific units to run metric analysis on. Sort by unit size, range, and region, or highlight only bookings from a specific booking channel and maximize the value of your data.