PriceLabs Airbnb Review: From Our Team of Superhosts

One of the hardest parts about being an Airbnb host is finding the ideal price for your rental. We know the feeling of doubt creeping in, thinking to yourself, “Am I pricing it too low?”, “Are people willing to pay these prices?” Most people look at nearby rentals to determine their price, or maybe give Airbnb’s Smart Pricing tool a go. Unfortunately, nearby listings aren’t the only factor that can affect your prices, and the Smart Pricing tool has a reputation for selling your vacation rental short.

A more reliable and better approach is to rely on third-party dynamic pricing tools. The market is filled with a variety of tools to assist hosts, but the question then begins to shift into “Which one should I use?” Well, that’s what we're here for today. So, join us as the BNBCalc team digs into PriceLabs with a review to find out if it’s a valuable tool for rental property owners.

What is PriceLabs?

PriceLabs is a dynamic pricing and revenue management tool, featuring support for platforms like Airbnb, Vrbo, and Houfy, among others. They make use of an AI-powered pricing algorithm to quickly analyze the market data, and a property’s historical performance to come up with optimal rates on the fly. It takes into account advanced factors like seasonality, amenities, rental market value, maximum occupants, and others to optimize your daily rates, leading to a maximized occupancy rate and overall revenue.

As a host or property manager, the use of PriceLabs, or any other dynamic pricing tool for that matter, is essential. It saves you the headache of having to run all of these numbers and comparing between listings, to come up with an effective pricing strategy. It’s not only a quality-of-life improvement, but a must-have in today’s short-term rental landscape.

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

PriceLabs offers a suite of powerful tools to help Airbnb hosts optimize their pricing, analyze performance, and maximize revenue. Let's take a closer look at the key features and how you can leverage them to boost your Airbnb business.

Dynamic Pricing

Dynamic Pricing is the core of PriceLabs, using AI pricing algorithms to analyze market data and your listing's historical performance to recommend optimal rates for each night. Here's how it can help you as a host:

• Customization: Set your base price, min/max rates, minimum stays, and tailor pricing for orphan days, last-minute bookings, and seasonal trends. This flexibility lets you adapt to your specific needs and goals.
• Automation: Prices are automatically synced to your Airbnb calendar daily. This saves you time and ensures your rates are always competitive based on the latest data.
• Insights: The pricing calendar breaks down different price recommendations, so you can understand the factors driving demand and rates for your listing.

In our experience, Dynamic Pricing is a game-changer for hosts who want to maximize occupancy and revenue without constantly manually adjusting prices. By leveraging PriceLabs' algorithms and customizing your strategy, you can set competitive rates that attract guests and optimize your earnings all through the power of automated pricing. They also support integration for over 100 property management and channel management systems, ensuring a smooth time when adding it to your existing tools.

Portfolio Analytics

Portfolio Analytics provides real-time performance data and insights to help you track and optimize your listings. Here's how it benefits hosts:

• Performance Tracking: Monitor key metrics like occupancy rate, average daily rate, and revenue for each listing in one dashboard. Easily spot trends and areas for improvement.
• Benchmarking: Compare your listings' performance to market averages and competing properties. This helps you understand your competitive position and identify opportunities.
• Data-Driven Decisions: Use the insights to refine your pricing strategy, marketing, and investment decisions. For example, you may decide to adjust your amenities or target market based on top-performing listings.

We've found Portfolio Analytics invaluable for keeping a pulse on our listings’ health and making informed decisions to help grow my rentals. The ability to benchmark against competitors is especially powerful for identifying ways to differentiate your properties and stay ahead of potential pricing trends.

Market Dashboard

Market Dashboards allow you to create custom comp sets to analyze your market and competition. Here's how hosts can take advantage of this feature:

• Customized Comp Sets: Filter properties by location, size, amenities, and other criteria to create relevant comp sets. This lets you compare apples-to-apples and gain actionable insights.
• Market Insights: Understand demand drivers, seasonality, and pricing trends in your market. Use this intel to optimize your listing details, photos, and rates to appeal to guests.
• Expansion Opportunities: Identify high-performing areas and property types to inform your investment strategy. Market Dashboards can help you spot lucrative opportunities to grow your portfolio.

As owners, we regularly study the competition and try to understand vacation rental trends to be fully updated. Market Dashboards presents these data right in front of you. The ability to create custom comp sets can help users position their listings effectively and make data-driven decisions about where and how to manage their rentals.

PriceLabs Revenue Estimator Pro

Revenue Estimator Pro is an Airbnb income calculator that predicts the earning potential of a property before you list it. Here's how it helps hosts:

• Revenue Projections: Get monthly and annual revenue estimates based on seasonality, local demand, and occupancy rates. This informs your financial planning and helps you set realistic expectations.
• Investment Decisions: Evaluate the viability of new properties you're considering purchasing or managing. Revenue Estimator Pro helps you focus on the most profitable opportunities.
• Pricing Optimization: Understand the impact of different pricing strategies on your bottom line. Experiment with different scenarios to find the optimal approach for each property.

Revenue Estimator Pro can be used when considering new properties to add to your portfolio. We highly recommend using it together with our own BNBCalc property analysis tool to ensure highly reliable data to help drive your decision. This gives users the confidence to trust investment decisions and plan their cash flow accordingly.

In summary, PriceLabs offers a robust set of features to help Airbnb hosts optimize pricing, analyze performance, and grow their business. By leveraging these tools and insights, you can make data-driven decisions, save time, and ultimately boost your revenue and profitability.

PriceLabs Data Quality: Is PriceLabs A Reliable Tool For Your Airbnb?

As an Airbnb host, the accuracy and reliability of the data used by your dynamic pricing tool is crucial. After all, you're entrusting this software to optimize your rates and maximize your revenue. If you still need to re-check every single metric, then it kind of defeats the purpose. So, how does PriceLabs stack up in terms of data quality?

Where Does PriceLabs Get Its Data?

PriceLabs relies on a combination of scraped data from major booking platforms and direct integrations with data providers to fuel its pricing algorithms. Specifically, PriceLabs collects data from:

• Airbnb
• Vrbo
• Booking.com
• Direct data from KeyData

By aggregating data from multiple sources, PriceLabs aims to provide a comprehensive view of the short-term rental market and competitor pricing.

PriceLabs' proprietary algorithm, Hyper Local Pulse (HLP), analyzes this data to detect vacation rental trends like seasonality, day of week, events, and booking lead time. It then combines these insights with your listing's historical performance to generate custom price recommendations for each available night.

Data Accuracy and Reliability

In our experience, PriceLabs' data is generally accurate and reliable. The platform updates its data daily to ensure prices reflect the latest market conditions. This frequency is on par with other leading dynamic pricing tools.

However, no tool is perfect. PriceLabs occasionally recommends rates that seem off-base and require manual adjustments. This can happen when there are insufficient data for a specific date or if unique property characteristics aren't fully accounted for in the algorithm.

Some users have reported issues with PriceLabs' data, citing "occasional data inaccuracies" and "misleading rates that need to be manually adjusted for better results". However, these complaints are relatively infrequent in user reviews.

It's worth noting that even the most sophisticated pricing tools require some hands-on management. As a host, it's important to regularly review your rates and make adjustments based on your intimate knowledge of your property and target guests. Remember, no one knows your property more than you do.

PriceLabs Pricing Review: Is PriceLabs Worth It?

Since PriceLabs offers a variety of tools, their pricing also varies, depending on the tools you’re looking to use.

• Dynamic Pricing - Plans start at $19.99 per listing per month, with discounts for users with multiple listings. Optionally, you can also go for a fixed percentage plan which takes 1% of your booking revenue.
• Portfolio Analytics - Portfolio Analytics is free to use and comes packaged when availing their other plans.
• Market Dashboard - Market Dashboard pricing will depend on how much data you want access to. You can get access to 1,000 listings for $9.99 per month, 5,000 listings for $19.99 per month, or up to 10,000 listings for $39.99 per month.
• Revenue Estimator Pro - Finally, Revenue Estimator Pro costs $10/month for up to 2 estimates, $45/month for 15 estimates, and $125/month for 50 estimates.

Dynamic Pricing is one of their main tools, so it makes sense that it’s one of their most premium offerings. The Market Dashboard and Revenue Estimator Pro can get quite expensive, depending on the amount of research you’re looking to do.

If you’re in the market for a potential Airbnb rental property, we highly suggest using our BNBCalc Property Analysis tool to help you out. It gives you a report on the potential revenue you can earn, up to 40 nearby STR comparables, LTR comparables, a financial summary, crucial statistics like occupancy rate, annual revenue, cap rate, and many more. Learn more about our plans here.

PriceLabs Plans Vs. Other Dynamic Pricing Subscription Plans

Now, let’s take a look at how PriceLabs stacks up against other Dynamic Pricing tools in the market. Here are the most popular ones:

• Airbnb Smart Pricing: Free to use for all Airbnb Hosts
• PriceLabs: Plans start at $19.99 per month or 1% of booking revenue, with discounts for multiple listings.
• 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.
• Beyond Pricing: Growth - 1% of booking revenue, Pro - 1.25% of booking revenue, or Guidance - 1.5% of booking revenue.

Most of the third-party tools have a pretty similar pricing range. While Airbnb Smart Pricing is free, it’s generally not advisable to use it because of its reputation for undervaluing rentals. This only means that pricing shouldn’t be a big factor when choosing the best one for your needs. However, we do recommend getting fixed plans for hosts with a large number of listings, and the percentage-based plans for smaller hosts. However, we still encourage you to do the math on which plan can save you the most money.

PriceLabs Reviews From Across the Web

Finally, let’s take a moment to check out what verified users from Capterra and TrustPilot, have to say about PriceLabs. Overall, hosts seem to be very satisfied when using PriceLabs, earning a solid score of 4.9/5 stars on Capterra and 4.3/5 stars on TrustPilot. This can be reflected in comments like these:

• Harvey L. says this on Capterra: “An extremely good service, from the quick responses to my questions and queries via email, to booking 30 minutes teams calls to screen share my PriceLabs and go through all my questions and problems. My bookings have gone up drastically at one of my properties to almost 100% occupancy rate, I won't go without pricelabs on any of my holiday let's now. I do find all of the different setting hard to use, but I guess that's just comes with spending more time on it.”
• An anonymous user on Trustpilot says: “This product is a gamechanger. I have struggled for 10 years to know how best to price my vacation rental. Not only does Pricelabs give me the confidence to understand why I select a particular price but it keeps an eye on things to let me know when the market circumstances change. The impact has been immediate and significant. And the support is excellent into the bargain. I am delighted to have found Pricelabs and highly recommend them if you rent any kind of holiday property.”
• Julya H. left this review on Capterra: “PriceLabs has made me so much more money. It intelligently prices your property to work with supply/ demand and other market forces. It has made me WAY more money than it costs and is an absolute no-brainer. PriceLabs has a lot of capabilities that can be complicated to learn. Still with the basics if you are just starting out.”

Satisfied users often comment about PriceLabs’ great customer support, and how their Dynamic Pricing features helped them generate more revenue. On the other side of the spectrum, users have also reported having difficulty figuring out the different capabilities and settings found within PriceLabs, leading to some confusion. So, we recommend Airbnb hosts to start with the basics and dedicate enough time to learn about how to utilize PriceLabs.

You’ve reached the end of our PriceLabs review. We hope we’ve helped you determine if PriceLabs’ software is a valuable tool for your revenue management system.

If you're considering adding new properties to your portfolio or just starting out your journey, don't forget to leverage the power of BNBCalc. Our intuitive tool allows you to analyze the profitability potential of any property you're eyeing, ensuring you make informed decisions as you grow your business. Start your BNBCalc free trial today and unlock the full potential of your Airbnb hosting journey!