Wheelhouse Pricing Review: Case Study and Pro Tips From a Power User

My two Airbnb’s I acquired in 2022 have the most optimistic BNB Calc projection by ~40%. The credit goes to Wheelhouse for dynamic pricing. Although I’m a small-time operator, at an industry event, I had the advantage of working with a revenue optimization expert who shared tips with me that he uses for his biggest clients.

I’ve used this same formula for over a year with only slight modifications.

The result? I’m outperforming properties worth twice as much as my home.

My $20/month pricing subscription and $12/mo competitor sets subscription drive an additional 30% a month in revenue. For $32, I’m unlocking $5K per month in additional revenue!

Here’s 5 Wheelhouse tips which unlocked maximum profitability for my properties.

1. Finding a Base Price

One of the first things I did was to find a base price. The base price serves as a foundation for your pricing strategy and will heavily factor into how much wiggle room Wheelhouse can have toward your pricing. Think of it as a reference point for your nightly rates without factoring in seasonality or demand fluctuations.

Wheelhouse even recommends a solid base price that’s guided by comps within your area. While this should work okay, here’s what you should do.

1. Use Wheelhouse Sets to create a Comparable Set of 10-15 properties almost identical in amenities and location to yours. Look for well-managed properties with decent occupancy rates and reviews.
2. Calculate a base rate based on the comparable’s average nightly rate.
3. Add 15-20% to this base rate.

Why go higher than your competitors in step 3? This gives you the flexibility to layer both Wheelhouse and Airbnb and VRBO platform-specific discounts, making my property more attractive to guests who book late or during the weekdays.

Airbnb and VRBO are reported to prioritize listings that offer steeper discounts. Customers will also see your discounts before booking.

This strategy also allows me to maximize the potential revenue during high-demand periods, and discount heavily during low-demand periods. It worked well for my upscale rentals.

Of course, this can be very market-specific, so I highly advise doing research about your local market, which I did via Wheelhouse’s active listing map, and selecting the best comps for your rental.

2. Minimum Stays

Most seasoned Airbnb hosts already know that a good rule of thumb is to have a 2-night minimum stay requirement. It deters awkward bookings and puts you in a better situation to become more profitable. Usually, Wheelhouse will price far out bookings at a higher nightly rate. It also helps decrease the likelihood of awkward gaps in your calendar.

I have 6 total rules that automatically adjust the minimum stay requirement depending on how far out guests are looking.

This helps increase revenue because it encourages longer stays and fills gaps as you get closer to present. Having a standard 2-night minimum stay rule, even for bookings made months away, can actually hinder your total revenue instead of helping it, especially if they book awkward dates (e.g. a thursday and friday night). Before you know it, you’ll be filled with tons of gaps in your calendar, and you’ll be heavily discounting your rates just to fill them up.

I use Wheelhouse’s Time-based rules feature to set up different minimum stay requirements based on how far off the bookings are made. Here are my personal settings.

• For bookings made within 7 days of the preferred booking date, I’ve set a minimum stay requirement of 2 nights.
• Bookings within 21 days have 2-night requirements for the weekdays and 3-night requirements for Fridays to Sundays.
• Bookings made after 21 days (a little in advance) have 2-night requirements for Sundays to Wednesdays and 3-night requirements for Thursdays to Saturdays.
• Bookings made 60 days 2 months in advance) have an increased 3-night minimums for most of the week, Sundays to Thursdays, and 4-night minimums for Fridays to Saturdays.
• Bookings 90 days in advance have a standard 4-night minimum across the board.
• Finally, I’ve increased the minimum stay requirement to 5 nights for bookings made after 160 days.

I know that this sounds a bit counterintuitive, especially since you’d typically want to have more bookings in advance, right? Well, it’s not that simple. I’ve learned that having longer stays at a higher price point is better than having bookings for a night or two a couple of months out.

Airbnb also offers built-in discount options to help hosts attract more bookings. These include Early Bird discounts for guests who book well in advance, Last-Minute discounts that lower prices as booking dates get closer, and long-term discounts for extended stays, such as Weekly (7+ nights) and Monthly (28+ nights) rates. While these options can be effective, they offer limited flexibility in controlling your pricing.

Wheelhouse can replace and enhance these built-in features by offering greater customization. With properly configured rules, Wheelhouse can override Airbnb’s static discount structure and dynamically adjust prices based on real-time market trends. Unlike Airbnb’s fixed percentage-based discounts, Wheelhouse’s adaptive pricing ensures you don’t leave potential revenue on the table.

I should also mention that you should always disable Airbnb’s Smart Pricing whenever you’re using a dynamic pricing tool like Wheelhouse. This just helps you avoid conflicts in pricing adjustments, and more often than not, Airbnb’s Smart Pricing doesn’t even provide good prices.

3. Gap Night Discounts

I’m sure I’m not alone when saying that gap nights are my worst nightmare. Unfortunately, they are inevitable in the Airbnb game. However, there are things I do to fill them up. One of those things is heavily pushing discounts to increase my revenue per available night (RevPAN).

Again, I took advantage of the rules within Wheelhouse. Whenever gaps of up to 2 nights are created, Wheelhouse automatically adjusts the price by about 35%. For gaps of up to 3 nights, it deducts 30%, and for gaps up to 4 nights, it’s down by 25%. These gaps are almost always on weekdays, which in my market (Tampa) are unlikely to get booked. If you’ve noticed, the longer the gaps, the smaller the discounts. Since shorter gaps are harder to fill out, it’s best to give out the highest discounts for higher chances of getting them booked.

4. Seasonality and Far Out

So far, I’ve been sharing tips regarding setting rules in Wheelhouse. Well, for Seasonality and Far Out pricing, I mainly use data-driven decisions to fuel my strategy. Wheelhouse has a smart AI engine that makes use of complex algorithms to figure out the best prices for your rental.

Your seasonality strategy mainly depends on your local market. This specific Airbnb I have is located in Tampa and is popular for work travel, and thereby experiences less demand fluctuations due to seasonality. I also have longer minimum stays for far out dates, and an inflated base price, so I don’t want to overly-inflate my calendar during high demand periods. For that reason, I’ve chosen to go with a very conservative seasonality approach. With my other discounts, I’m still able to have reasonable occupancy during the low-demand periods. As seen in the image above, the lowest months, between August to November, all sit within the low 20% range. This is also a great reason why having a slightly higher base price is beneficial, especially if you know that you have an excellent rental in your hands.

The second part of the data-driven tools I use is for Far Future pricing. For this strategy, I mainly go with what Wheelhouse recommends. As reflected by the graph above, my Far Future premium pricing starts a year in advance, at about 1% extra. I chose to use “Recommended” not “More Aggressive”, because my base price is already high and most of my Airbnb discounts are time-based (last minute). This provides a solid balance between getting bookings a long way out while still having decent chances of getting the extra revenue that potential high-demand events can bring.

5. Pacing

Today's final tip is about optimizing occupancy pacing. Pacing offers added flexibility by adjusting to both occupancy levels and booking lead times. It ensures you can strategically discount upcoming periods dates that aren’t quite meeting expectations.

My rules for this are as follows:

The values I used were mainly based on my average occupancy rate. This specific property I have has an average occupancy of about 65%. So, I use this as the base for my upper limit. The lowest occupancy I’m comfortable with is 50%. I got to this value by simply watching the trends within my area and my rental’s comparables.

From there, I’ve added a 5% discount for 7 to 30 days of lead time and a slightly increased 10% discount for less than 6 days. This slight decrease encourages more people to book when things are going as expected and can potentially help me get over my average occupancy of 65%.

On the other hand, when bookings are coming in too slow, I provide higher discounts of 10% for 7 to 30 days lead time and 15% for shorter ones. Again, this can help jumpstart the bookings and bring it back up to a rate that’s more akin to my average occupancy.

I highly recommend playing around with this setting until you find a range that works for you. The 15% decrease seems to be my sweet spot for those slow-moving days, but yours could be different.

Wheelhouse Sets

As a bonus tip, I’d also like to share my experience with using Wheelhouse Sets. Put simply, Sets are a collection of rentals that meet your specific criteria. I mainly use mine as a way to benchmark and research similar comps within my area. This then helps fuel my pricing strategy and allows me to learn more about how I’m performing against my potential competitors. It includes how much you should charge, the ongoing booking trends within your area, and more. For the most part, every tip and rule I’ve mentioned earlier came from Sets. I highly recommend creating a set or two for your rental.

I created a set for my property through filtering by bedrooms and sorting by descending nightly revenue. My property has 5 bedrooms and is marketed towards large groups who are booking for social gatherings, work events, and bachelor/bachelorette parties. These larger houses are often the ones with the highest nightly rates mainly because of the premium amenities and large groups they cater to.

Here’s a map of the comps I’ve added to my set (the red ones) and my own rental (the green dot). At first, this entire map will be filled with all of the active rentals within your area, which is why it’s important to filter them out.

Many of the comps I found in my set had pools, but none had a golf simulator or game room. I installed both, and it’s one of the primary reasons I’m performing 15-20% better than my competitors.

There were a variety of listings in Tampa that had 5 bedrooms, so I narrowed it down by choosing ones that were the closest to my location and ones that had the most similar amenities and offerings I had. In total, I selected 15 active listings as my set. I personally think that the 10 to 15 range is the ideal set number you’d want to be aiming for. Of course, if there aren’t that many that fit within your criteria, don’t try and force it as it will likely just skew with the stats.

Benchmarking Your Sets

As mentioned, I added 15 similar 4-bedroom properties with a pool within a few miles of my listing. This was my Set. Now, I use these listings to benchmark and find trends that I can take advantage of.

The main thing I did was to watch my competitor’s calendars. Through that, I was able to notice that all of the similar properties I selected were booked almost every weekend, but free during the rest of the week. Here’s how things are looking like as of the time of writing:

To take advantage of this newfound knowledge, I increased my prices on the weekend and decreased during the rest of the week. This resulted in more bookings during the weekdays and higher revenue for the weekends for my rental.

Try to identify days of the week when you’re usually unoccupied. Then, find those days in the calendar and see how much your competitors are charging. I personally discounted my rates heavily on weekdays and went lower than what most, if not all, of my comps were charging. My rental is cheaper during the week, and more expensive during the weekend. But since weekends get booked almost always, I’m still keeping my occupancy high throughout the week. The result? Higher RevPar.

How Does Wheelhouse Compare to PriceLabs?

So, time for the golden question, “How does Wheelhouse compare to PriceLabs”? Having used both, I can confidently say that they are excellent dynamic pricing platforms. They’re similarly priced and share many of the same core features, so you’re getting solid value with either option.

For me, the key reason I switched to Wheelhouse is its superior flexibility and competitor research. While both platforms offer a solid option for “easy mode,” Wheelhouse stands out by providing far greater customization without requiring a deep dive into complex analytics that a more precise pricing strategy requires. It’s intuitive, easy to manage, and user-friendly, yet it still delivers more control compared to its competitors. That’s why I like Wheelhouse.

Note: I’ve also heard that larger PM’s with many listings prefer Wheelhouse since it scales better for large portfolios, allowing them to apply pricing settings to many properties at once.