To gain comprehensive insights into your vacation rental rates in various markets, Airbnb pricing tools like PriceLabs and Beyond (formerly Beyond Pricing) are needed. These tools provide essential information on pricing dynamics. They can also give you a better vision of how to boost your income based on different seasons, occasions, and days. Let’s take a look at Airbnb pricing tools, Beyond vs PriceLabs. This is a side-by-side comparison of their features to see which one is a better property management system revenue tool.
Table of Contents
Price Optimisation and Dynamic Pricing
Classical economics highlighted the idea that a good’s price is not rooted in intrinsic value. It is rather an interplay of supply and demand. In 1985, American Airlines used optimisation algorithms and yield management systems in order to compete with PeopleExpress. This revenue management capability was an important success for American Airlines.
Hotels and serviced apartments have similar characteristics to Airlines. Rooms are limited and immediately perishable, and customers book ahead of time.
After the successful experience of American Airlines, other industries such as hospitality started to adopt revenue management to maximise their profits. For most companies, better management of pricing is the fastest and most cost-effective way to increase profits.
The following table shows the result of a study (A. T. Kearney (2000)) on the average impact of a 1% improvement in different variables on operating profit:
| Variable | Improvement of operating profit |
| Price management | 8.2% |
| Variable cost | 5.1% |
| Sales volume | 3.0% |
| Fixed costs | 2.0% |
Therefore, it is worthwhile to consider using Airbnb pricing tools for your serviced apartment, vacation rental, or hotel business.
Property revenue management strategies can be applied manually or assisted with the use of automated technology. As the variety of unit types grows, the manual application of revenue management strategies becomes time-consuming, increasing the likelihood of errors. However, an automated revenue management process still requires human intervention to optimise the process.
In this article, we will be comparing two important players of Airbnb pricing tools: Beyond vs PriceLabs. Hopefully, this will help you choose the one that meets your needs the most.
We will compare these two Airbnb pricing tools based on the following criteria:
- Price Recommendation
- Market Intelligence
- Key Performance Indicators (KPI) Reports
- Automation & Customisation
- Cost
Price Recommendation
PriceLabs
Among Airbnb pricing tools, PriceLabs price recommendation method can be simplified with the following formula:
Last-minute discounts, orphan day discounts, and far-out premiums can also be included by this revenue management tool. Base Price is the average rate that your listing has been booked at or its Average Daily Rate (ADR).
A minimum and maximum price can also be set for the price recommendation. It is highly recommended to set these two values as well since very low and high prices will have a bad effect on customers, and thus revenue.
PriceLabs allows you to use date-specific override and other customisations to override the automatic price recommendations whenever you need to. Demand is estimated based on the occupancy of the nearby Airbnb listings. When the occupancy of nearby listings starts to increase, PriceLabs increases your price accordingly since this indicates an event has triggered an increase in demand.
Occupancy and ADR go hand in hand to make revenue for us. Therefore, ADR or price recommendation cannot be done without taking into account the occupancy rate. PriceLabs has devised a very useful tool for this matter which is called Occupancy Based Adjustment.
As an Airbnb pricing tool, PriceLabs can calculate the occupancy rate for both single-unit and multi-unit listings. Furthermore, it has a Portfolio Occupancy Adjustment tool which can be applied to a group of listings.
Beyond
In the world of Airbnb pricing tools, Beyond has a similar approach to generating prices. The basis of the price recommendation is “Base Price.” Seasonality, day of the week, and local events are applied on top of the Base Price to calculate the recommended price.
Beyond can also consider last-minute and orphan day discounts. This Airbnb pricing tool does not offer a feature to automatically change the prices according to occupancy. Instead, the user should check the health score of the listing which is based on the occupancy of the listing and the market, and change the prices accordingly.
As an Airbnb pricing tool, Beyond offers date override features similar to PriceLabs. Date-specific override is also possible with Beyond.
Winner: Tie
Market Intelligence
PriceLabs
Market intelligence plays a crucial role in price optimisation. Comparing Airbnb pricing tools PriceLabs vs Beyond, PriceLabs offers the Base Price Help tool. This tool helps you in analysing listings nearest to your property to set a base price accordingly. Additionally, adjusting the number of bedrooms helps tailor the results to align with your competition.
PriceLab’s Market Dashboards are fully automated and personalised and can help you track data through vibrant graphs. The Price and Occupancy trends are one of the most useful Market Dashboards:
The Neighborhood Data feature can also be used to explore local trends:
With PriceLabs, you can also set weekly and monthly discounts. They will apply these discounts to the PMS when creating a booking quote for the selected duration. For example, if you set a 20% monthly discount, PriceLabs will send the regular daily rates to your connected platform. If you receive bookings with a duration of 30 days or more, a 20% discount will be applied to the total booking amount.
Beyond
Beyond is very resourceful at market data among Airbnb pricing tools. The Market Data section shows the future neighbourhood occupancy compared with last year’s, the impact of events, etc.:
For the neighbourhood pricing, it monitors Airbnb and Homeaway. As you have already noticed, the Airbnb pricing tool Beyond does not classify prices into percentiles, which is a disadvantage.
Furthermore, you only have access to the market data related to your listing type. PriceLabs, on the other hand, gives you access to market data of the rest of the listing types. This can be helpful if you are considering scaling and investing in a new property type.
Comparing Airbnb pricing tools PriceLabs vs Beyond, Beyond has the Comp Sets feature, as well.
You can learn about your competitors’ pricing and health score (an index which is a function of the listing occupancy). Similar to Market Data, you have access to Homeaway listings as well.
Winner: PriceLabs
KPI Reports
PriceLabs
PriceLabs’s Market Dashboards also include KPI reports. This section outlines eight KPIs for the recent seven, 30, or 365 days in the area, comparing them to the corresponding periods in the past.
Beyond
Beyond reports the health of the listing based on its occupancy in addition to the market occupancy. However, this Airbnb pricing tool cannot correctly calculate the occupancy rate of multi-unit listings similar to PriceLabs listing’s health.
Beyond’s Insights Dashboard provides six KPI reports based on your portfolio and market stats.
It also gives you a Portfolio Score, indicating the overall Health Score of your entire portfolio. This is calculated by your listings’ Health Scores / Number of listings. The Health Score gauges your listing’s pacing relative to market occupancy.
This revenue management tool also has historical data for the market occupancy and performance indicators of your listing.
Winner: Beyond
Which Revenue Management Tool Costs Less?
PriceLabs
PriceLabs follows a flat pricing strategy among Airbnb pricing tools. Based on the number of listings, they charge you a fixed amount per month.
Beyond
Beyond charges between 1-2% of the total revenue, including fees and excluding tax based on the booking date. Also, annual plans require an annual commitment.
Winner: PriceLabs
Automation and Customisation
PriceLabs
PriceLabs is very powerful in managing minimum stays, which makes it an important Airbnb pricing tool. You can specify weekday and weekend minimum stays. In addition, the tool automatically updates the minimum stay for far-out bookings and super far-out bookings. Price adjustment for the day of the week or apply minimum, maximum, or percentage change of specific dates.
PriceLabs can automatically manage minimum stay for orphan days and last-minute discounts. This Airbnb pricing tool also features minimum weekend pricing and overrides which can be applied to account, group, or listing level.
Custom Seasonal Profile is a PriceLabs feature that overrides the seasonality trend calculated by the software.
Another useful feature that PriceLabs have is that you can define mapping the listings. Similar listings such as two unit types in a hotel can be mapped, and the prices and customisations of the parent listing will be automatically copied to the child listings.
Occupancy-based adjustment and Portfolio Occupancy-based Adjustment can save a lot of time. The prices can be changed automatically based on the occupancy of the listing or a portfolio.
Beyond
As an Airbnb pricing tool, Beyond offers a Customise Tab that allows you to adjust certain settings for your listing. It includes Minimum and Maximum Prices, Minimum Stays, Gap Fills, Check-in and Check-out Days, Time-Based Adjustments, Gap Price Adjustments, Extra Guest Fees, etc.
Minimum Stays let you establish the minimum number of nights required for a reservation. You can set Annual Minimum Stays for year-round requirements and Seasonal Minimum Stays for varying periods with different requirements.
Also, the Time-Based Minimum Stays allow you to set stay duration requirements based on the proximity to the booking date.
Bulk Actions empower you to efficiently update and customise various settings within your Beyond Dashboard. This feature allows you to modify Base and Minimum Prices, adjust Minimum Stays, apply or remove Manual Overrides, synchronise Prices, and modify any available Customise setting from your listing’s Customise Tab.
Winner: Tie
Where Do PriceLabs and Beyond Get Their Data from?
Pricelabs gets the market data from Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com, and direct data from KeyData.
Beyond pulls market data from Airbnb and Vrbo (Homeaway).
Summary and Verdict
Comparing Airbnb pricing tools, Beyond and PriceLabs are smart property management system revenue tools and can help you optimise your revenue.
Beyond has more tools for Airbnb pricing management and for monitoring the performance of your listings. On the other hand, PriceLabs is more competent at market intelligence, listing management, and automation.
Their price recommendation capabilities are not very different, and you need to do experimentation to reach a final decision. It is worth mentioning no matter how smart they are, they both need your regular monitoring and customisation anyway. In terms of cost, Beyond is the more expensive option, especially if you are managing a large portfolio.
Note: If you use the code (TMkEWR) while signing up to PriceLabs, you get $10 Credits.
| Aspect | Winner |
| Price Recommendation | Tie |
| Market Intelligence | PriceLabs |
| Key Performance Indicators (KPI) reports | Beyond |
| Automation & Customisation | Tie |
| Cost | PriceLabs |
