AirDNA Airbnb Dynamic Pricing Review: From Our Team of Superhosts

As hosts, we understand how crucial it is to find the right pricing for your short term rental is crucial to maximizing your rental income. I mean, I’m sure we’re not the only ones who think “Is this a fair price to charge?” when it comes to our rentals.

It’s the main reason why dynamic pricing tools have become so popular and almost a necessity when managing a rental property. This brings us to AirDNA. It’s one of the biggest tools for Airbnb property management, and we’re here today to talk about it to try and understand if it’s an essential tool for your business. We’ll mainly be talking about its dynamic pricing capabilities but our complete AirDNA review will also feature a breakdown of its other features, prices, and its overall public perception.

Best AirDNA Features and How Hosts Can Use Them for Their Airbnb

AirDNA offers a wide array of tools to help you manage your Airbnb investment. Let’s take a look at what each one is and how they can help you as a host.

MarketMinder

AirDNA's MarketMinder provides interactive maps and historical data about cities, neighborhoods, and individual properties. You can access key metrics such as average daily rates, occupancy rates, revenue, and rental growth. The tool also assigns a Market Grade based on rental demand, revenue growth, seasonality, regulation, and investability.

As hosts, it helped us understand local market trends and general performance. It can also help you find high-performing areas for potential properties and portfolio expansion. Finally, it can also help with benchmarking or comparing your rental and its performance to other nearby properties.

Rentalizer

The AirDNA Rentalizer, also known as the AirDNA calculator, analyzes and predicts the earning potential of a specific property as a short-term rental. By entering the address, number of bedrooms, bathrooms, and guest capacity, you can see estimates for annual revenue, average daily rate, and occupancy rate.

This is a very helpful tool that gives you an insight into properties on your radar. It can help you make data-driven decisions, based on what active rentals are already earning. If you’re in the market for a new rental, we also suggest testing out our own property analysis tool as it not only leverages Airdna’s Rentalizer but other data sources as well in order to create a brand-able financial analysis you can share with investors and business partners. This can help you get an idea of not only revenue but expense variables and think about the full picture of an investment. BNBCalc was built to help hosts and investors scale their portfolios by being easily share-able and customizable.

Smart Rates

AirDNA's Smart Rates is their dynamic pricing tool that provides customized pricing recommendations based on real-time market demand. It factors in seasonality, day of the week, holidays, and booking lead time to help hosts maximize their revenue. Smart Rates integrates with property management software to automatically push pricing updates to booking platforms.

We find that AirDNA’s dynamic pricing can help maximize revenue during peak demand. Sometimes, you just don’t have enough time to manually adjust your rental’s prices to suit the current market, Smart Rates does it for you automatically. It can also help increase occupancy during slower periods, providing easy access to rental data and coming up with recommended pricing to suit your specific market and to help you update your own.

AirDNA Data Quality: Is AirDNA Accurate?

AirDNA claims to be the most reliable source for short-term rental data, with a 96.2% accuracy rate for predicting revenue. The company collects data from over 10 million Airbnb and Vrbo active listings across 120,000 global markets.

It's important to note that while AirDNA does its best to provide highly accurate data and takes added measures to ensure data reliability, hosts should still use their own judgment and compare AirDNA's insights with their actual results and go from there. This is the best overall approach, regardless of what tool you’re relying on. Use their Smart Rates tool to make informed decisions about what is reflected on the ground.

From our end, it has been a pretty great and flawless experience. AirDNA’s Smart Rates suggestions have truly been helpful in influencing our pricing strategy and setting optimal rates. So, give it out a try for yourself, and see the results in action.

AirDNA Price Review: How Much Does AirDNA Cost?

AirDNA has three primary plans for individuals. These are:

• Free - From the name itself, this plan costs $0 but offers limited features to users. It offers no dynamic pricing, limited rentalizer uses, and access to market insights. But hey, it’s free.
• Pro - The pro plan is probably what most users will avail. It costs $170 per month or $34 per month when billed annually. It gives users access to dynamic pricing for up to 5 listings, smart rate recommendations based on 12 months of data, access to advanced historical data, exporting and downloading, along with extra revenue management and PMS capabilities.
• Advanced - the advanced plan is for power users who have numerous listings, advanced insights, dynamic pricing for unlimited listings, hand-picked comp sets, and a few others. The pricing is specific to your needs, so you’ll need to reach out to AirDNA directly to get a quote.

AirDNA also offers a business subscription option that provides personalized recommendations based on what your short-term rentals need. Again, this is very custom and you’ll have to reach out to an AirDNA specialist to allow them to create a plan and price that works for you.

If you aren’t ready to commit to AirDNA just yet, we advise signing up for a free account. While it only gives you limited information and access, it’s still an excellent way to get a feel of the software and learn more about its uses. If you’re looking to save on expenses, going with the annual route only translates to about $34 per month when billed annually.

Remember, AirDNA offers a lot of data, tools, and features included within their subscription plans. It’s a great option for advanced hosts and investors with large portfolios as they will certainly find value out of their subscriptions just because of the sheer amount of features AirDNA provides. At this point, their Smart Rates tool is only a cherry on top.

AirDNA Plans Vs. Other Dynamic Pricing Subscription Plans

We already know AirDNA’s plans, but let’s take a look at how it compares if we’re looking at a dynamic pricing standpoint. Here are the prices of other popular tools for dynamic pricing:

• Airbnb Smart Pricing: Free to use
• PriceLabs: Plans start at $19.99 per month or 1% of booking revenue, with discounts for multiple listings.
• Beyond Pricing: Growth - 1% of booking revenue, Pro - 1.25% of booking revenue, or Guidance - 1.5% of booking revenue.
• Wheelhouse: Fixed 1% of monthly booking revenue (Minimum $2.99 per month), or a flat $19.99/month per listing with discounts for multiple listings.

Dynamic pricing isn’t the only tool that AirDNA offers. When you avail of a subscription, you get access to tons of highly influential short-term rental data, market insights, investing tools, and management tools. So, just keep that in mind when making a decision.

AirDNA Reviews From Across the Web

Now let’s take a look at the general public’s opinions about AirDNA. We’ve taken the liberty of going around the web to a couple of reviews and opinions that people left. AirDNA scores a respectable score of 3.7 out of 5 stars on Trustpilot. Here are what people have to say about the platform:

• Lydie Locutura says this: “AirDNA is a great tool to optimise the pricing strategy, get more bookings and a better profitability. I highly recommend it.”
• Greg Barton left this comment: “Love the data level but would give five stars if I could purchase 30 days. Not looking for 30 day trial, rather 30 days to look at a specific market. That way, I can look at say three different potential markets for potential Airbnb purchases. Once I buy, of course I’m going to subscribe to annual membership of that market but I don’t need a year of all three markets for a year!”
• Chris had this to say: “Tom Williams was a great tour guide for navigating the AirDNA website. I now have a much better understanding of the tools available, their benefits and how they can assist me in making sound Airbnb investment decisions. I would recommend AirDNA to anyone that might benefit from the extremely detailed and in depth information that AirDNA provides regarding real estate, Airbnbs or the like. Thank you, Tom!”

The reviews claim AirDNA as a great pricing strategy tool and enjoy using it for their STR. Others claim it’s a do-it-all platform that provides a little bit of everything. If you can put the data and the tools provided by AirDNA to good use across multiple listings, then you’ll be on your way to making the most out of your subscription.

Final Thoughts

AirDNA is a powerful platform that offers a wealth of data and insights for short-term rental hosts and investors. Its MarketMinder, Rentalizer, and Smart Rates tools can help users make data-informed decisions to optimize their listings and maximize monthly revenue. They can even use it to conduct investment property research within a specific location.

It's essential to weigh the benefits and see if AirDNA fits your short-term rental needs. AirDNA is a powerful platform that can help make your business better. At the end of the day, that’s all we want to achieve.