Wheelhouse Airbnb Review: From Our Team of Superhosts

Finding the right price for your Airbnb can be tricky. A lot of factors can affect your pricing, from seasonality, available amenities, and the pricing of other Airbnbs near you, just to name a few. This leads to a need to constantly adjust the pricing to ensure that you’re never overpriced nor underselling your rental.

Airbnb is aware of this problem and made their own dynamic pricing tool called “Airbnb Smart Pricing.” While it can be helpful, we, along with other hosts, have often found it to typically price your rental under market value, leaving you with a ton of potential revenue left on the table. Here’s where Wheelhouse comes in.

At its core, Wheelhouse is a dynamic pricing and revenue management platform that can help both owners and property managers maximize their earnings. It can help ease the burden of keeping up with pricing fluctuations brought by short term rental market trends, seasonality, and local events, among other factors.

Wheelhouse also features a wide range of portfolio management tools that can help owners with a large number of rentals perform bulk actions and make changes across listings simultaneously. Not to mention, a portfolio analytics system that gives you detailed statistics about your properties in one glance.

So, the BNBCalc team has decided to hook you up with our own Wheelhouse Airbnb review. Join us as we discuss the key features, pricing, and public reviews of the platform to help you decide whether Wheelhouse can be a valuable addition to your rental property management arsenal.

Best Wheelhouse Features

Let’s first talk about the different tools and features built into the Wheelhouse platform. While they have a wide range of products available for users, their core features can be divided into three main categories; Dynamic Pricing, Portfolio Management, and Performance Analytics

Dynamic Pricing

Wheelhouse offers a dynamic pricing solution that allows Airbnb hosts to optimize their rates and maximize revenue. The platform provides three main pricing strategies:

• Data-driven pricing: Leverages machine learning algorithms to analyze market trends, competitor rates, and other factors to recommend optimal prices.
• Rule-based pricing: Allows users to set custom pricing rules based on specific criteria like seasonality, day of the week, or special local events.
• Hybrid pricing: Combines data-driven and rule-based strategies for maximum flexibility.

Hosts can fine-tune their pricing engine with over 15 customizable settings to handle any scenario. This granular control enables users to create, evaluate, and edit any aspect of their pricing strategy in seconds, across 1 to 1,000+ listings. This can also be connected to various property management or channel management systems, and your own website to further streamline your process and ensure conflicting prices. As a host, the customization and integration support is definitely a must-have.

Portfolio Management

Wheelhouse enables users to efficiently manage their entire portfolio, whether it's a single listing or thousands. Key portfolio management features include:

• Dynamic Sets: Group listings based on shared attributes for easier analysis and strategy implementation. Capture insights from a small group of specific listings you select or a broad set from multiple markets. Leverage sets for pricing, portfolio strategies, owner communications, acquisition, merchandising, and more.
• Bulk Actions: The Bulk Actions feature enables hosts to make changes to pricing, minimum stays, and other settings across multiple listings simultaneously. This saves significant time when managing revenue optimization for a large portfolio.

We know how hard managing multiple listings can be. These features can be life savers for more seasoned investors or property managers, allowing you to change numerous listings in one go.

Performance Analytics

Power users who want to maximize their listings down to a tee, Wheelhouse offers powerful Performance Analytics tools to help evaluate your portfolio's performance. With these features, hosts can:

• Slice, segment, layer and compare data using flexible visualization tools to unlock rapid, nuanced learnings
• Rapidly build context to drive decisions, actions, and communications
• Conduct A/B comparisons between pricing strategies to determine which Airbnb pricing strategy works best (e.g. high vs low demand sensitivity, maximum rate vs maximum occupancy, gap nights).
• Analyze bookings, track pacing & pickup, and leverage budgets to ensure they always exceed revenue goals

Performance Analytics allows hosts to compare key metrics side-by-side, choose from portfolio, segment, set, or listing-level comparisons, and benchmark against the same time last year.

It can definitely be a bit overwhelming to fully comprehend these stats, but reading into the numbers can greatly help you achieve a rental’s full potential.

It’s exciting to see how Wheelhouse can help improve our pricing strategy. If you’re coming from Airbnb’s Smart Pricing tool, the first thing you’ll notice are the vastly different prices that Wheelhouse recommends. But, if you trust the process, along with the algorithm, you’ll likely see positive results.

Wheelhouse Data Quality: Is Wheelhouse A Reliable Tool?

However, all of these tools and features are useless if Wheelhouse doesn’t provide accurate and reliable booking data. Wheelhouse analyzes over 21 million listings from a variety of online booking platforms on a daily basis to create an extensive collection of data. This is then transformed into over 20 billions data points that is used to inform booking strategies. They make use of a pricing engine, powered by advanced data science research to offer dynamic pricing selections for factors such as seasonality, local demand, and competitor pricing.

Your experience can vary, depending on your location and the data available for that area. However, Wheelhouse themselves claim that users can expect an average increase of about 20.6% using their dynamic pricing features.

We’ve gathered are a couple of verified reviews from Wheelhouse users to see the public perception about it’s data quality:

• “The pricing algorithm does a great job and is very accurate: as an example, not only was it able to precisely forecast the peak in demand generated by Fashion Week in this particular street in Paris where my property is located, but also to calculate by how much i should increase nightly prices to make the most of it. I was really amazed…” by an anonymous user on Capterra
• “there is an occasional lag in automated updating pricing in user platform (Airbnb) when blocked dates that have been opened. You can do it with a manual refresh if you remember to do so. Would be good if the refresh would work instantly all the time, however, its a relatively minor inconvenience to check.” by Danielle H on GetApp.
• “Love their algorithm to help price my Airbnb accurately! Backed up with solid data. Good blend of data driven pricing blended with full rule-based user control. I've been a user for nearly 10 years. I'm quite surprised it's not more widely konwn, or integrated into Airbnb natively. Well done.” by Chance D on G2.

Overall, Wheelhouse delivers in terms of data accuracy, predictions, and forecast. Users can sometimes run into some minor issues with automated updates for pricing, but nothing too deal-breaking.

We also found the Market Reports and Comp Sets features to be incredibly useful. By comparing our performance with similar listings, we were able to identify areas where we could improve and make data-driven decisions.

Wheelhouse Pricing Review

Now that we’ve talked about the variety of tools under Wheelhouse’s platform that can be used to help improve your vacation rental, let’s talk about its added costs to your business.

Wheelhouse offers three main pricing plans for their dynamic pricing and revenue management platform:

Pro Flex:

• Price: 1% of monthly booking revenue (minimum monthly fee of $2.99)

They also offer discounts if your portfolio size is composed of 50 or more listings. Contact them to learn more about their offer.

Pro Flat:

• Price: $19.99 per listing per month

Discounts available based on portfolio size:

• 10-49 listings: $16.99 per listing per month (15% discount)
• 50 or more listings: contact their team for additional discounts and exclusive rates.

Custom Enterprise Plans

For enterprises with 50+ listings, Wheelhouse offers custom pricing and solutions tailored to their specific needs. To avail of this plan, you’ll have to contact their sales team.

All plans include access to the same features and products namely:

• Dynamic Pricing
• Performance Analytics
• Market Insights
• Navigator
• Access to APIs

The main difference between the plans is how billing works:

• Pro Flex: Wheelhouse bills you 1% of your monthly booking revenue, with discounts applied based on portfolio size.
• Pro Flat: Wheelhouse bills you a flat rate per listing per month in advance, with discounts applied based on portfolio size.
• Custom Enterprise: This will depend on your private discussion with Wheelhouse and will vary per customer.

Dynamic Sets

Dynamic Sets is a newly introduced product that allows users to explore listings within their new mapping interface, featuring up to 18 filter categories. This makes it easier to do a group analysis and come up with fresh strategies for your dynamic pricing.

• Price: $12.99 per set per month

Dynamic Sets can be used independently or together with their Dynamic Pricing plans, depending on your overall business strategy.

In summary, Wheelhouse's pricing plans are designed to accommodate portfolios of various sizes, with discounts available as your portfolio grows. The different plans and payment structures provide access to their full suite of dynamic pricing, portfolio management, and performance analytics tools to help you maximize your revenue and streamline your operations.

Wheelhouse Plans Vs. Other Dynamic Pricing Subscription Plans

We know how crucial it is to track every penny you spend on an Airbnb, this is especially true when you’re first starting out. So, we’ll quickly tackle Wheelhouse’s available prices and compare them to other popular pricing tools to help you determine if Wheelhouse fits within your budget.

• Airbnb Smart Pricing: Free
• 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.
• PriceLabs: Plans start at $19.99 per month or 1% of booking revenue.

As a general rule of thumb, the higher your revenue, the better it is for you to avail of the flat pricing plans. For smaller Airbnb listings or those just starting out, the percentage-based plans will likely be the smart choice. However, we still suggest doing your own calculations to confirm the best route for your short-term rental business.

Overall, the pricing for each dynamic pricing tool doesn’t vary that much. It mostly depends on what features you want included within your plan and how many bookings you’re looking to manage, among a few other metrics. So, we recommend that you keep the subscription plans at the back of your mind but don’t make them the main driver for your decision-making since they are pretty similar to each other.

Usewheelhouse.com Reviews From Across the Web

Finally, let’s take a look at some authentic public reviews from verified Wheelhouse users from trusted websites like Trustpilot and G2. For reference, users graded Wheelhouse 4.6 out of 5 stars on Trustpilot and a perfect 5/5 on G2. These very satisfied ratings are reflected in the reviews. Here’s a few of them:

• Wheelhouse gives peace of mind: “I bought Wheelhouse to manage my prices as I felt that Airbnb dynamic pricing was underselling me. Since I have installed Wheelhouse, I am getting better prices in line with actual market and historic data. I now have peace of mind and just monitor the predictive pricing from time to time just to see how it is going.” by Greg Haughey on Trustpilot
• My income and occupancy rate have both…: “My income and occupancy rate have both increased since I got this product. Only 2 months in but it's made a noticeable difference for the little cost of their product. It's encouraging me to buy more properties.” by Jarrid Boudreaux on Trustpilot
• Very user-friendly: “I've been using Wheelhouse for a while now, and I must say it's incredibly user-friendly and easy to navigate. It offers a wide range of features and options, making it the most enjoyable dynamic pricing tool I've tried. Highly recommended. It would be great if they also have data from booking.com for market research.” by Daniël R. from G2

A few stand-out features include Wheelhouse’s user-friendly nature, decent customization options, and transparent pricing algorithm. While Wheelhouse isn’t a perfect dynamic pricing tool, its great features and intuitive user interface make it a solid and valuable tool for short-term rental hosts.

As with any pricing tool, it's important to monitor your results and make adjustments as needed. Wheelhouse is not a "set it and forget it" solution, but rather a tool to help hosts make informed decisions and maximize their revenue.

That's all for our Wheelhouse Airbnb review. Hopefully, we were able to help you determine if Wheelhouse is a worthy tool for your vacation rental management experience. 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!