Dynamic pricing is at the core of the success of an Airbnb business. Setting up a comprehensive vacation rental pricing strategy, however, requires access to the best industry data, continuous data collection and cleaning, and hundreds of calculations each and every day.
While this process is difficult with a single property, it becomes virtually impossible with a portfolio of multiple rentals. The solution is using a dynamic Airbnb pricing tool, and PriceLabs is one of the most popular options available to hosts and property managers. But is PriceLabs worth it?
This PriceLabs review looks at what the software offers, what features it provides, how it is priced, and how it is evaluated by existing users to help property owners and managers decide if this is the right choice for their needs.
What PriceLabs Is
PriceLabs is a short term rental dynamic pricing and revenue management tool that helps hosts and property managers increase occupancy and boost income. The platform works with Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, vacation rentals, BnBs, aparthotels, and serviced apartments. Currently, the tool is used by more than 35,000 owners and property managers to price over 300,000 listings in 135 countries.
Richie Khandelwal founded PriceLabs in 2014, with headquarters in Chicago, IL. The company aims to provide small businesses in the hospitality space with AI-based analytical tools that put them on equal footing with large companies.
This is done through a solution that bases short term rental pricing on the basics of supply and demand. In this way, PriceLabs solves two major problems: setting the wrong rates, and spending too much time on identifying the best rates.
PriceLabs Pricing
PriceLabs runs a subscription-based pricing model that scales along with the business.
Each main product comes with a separate pricing structure with two or three different plans based on number of properties, area coverage, and usage.
Dynamic Pricing & Portfolio Analytics
- Portfolio Analytics: $0/month
- Dynamic Pricing $19.99/month or 1% of booking
Market Dashboard
- 1,000 listings and local market coverage: $9.99/month
- 5,000 listings and wider market coverage: $19.99/month
- 10,000 listings and city-size area coverage: $39.99/month
Revenue Estimator Pro
- 2 estimates/month: $10/month
- 15 estimates/month: $45/month or $450/year
- 50 estimates/month: $125/month or $1,250/year
While this is a very flexible pricing model to ensure that users pay for only what they need, calculating the cost becomes complicated with access to a few different tools.
PriceLabs offers a 30-day free trial without the need to enter a credit card. Customers can cancel their subscriptions at any time.
Who PriceLabs Is Best For
Both individual vacation rental hosts and professional property managers can benefit from using PriceLabs for the automated pricing for their rentals.
Customers who PriceLabs works best for include:
- Airbnb hosts: PriceLabs integrates with Airbnb listings to automatically propose the rates and strategies that prioritize earnings and maximize profit. The algorithms analyze extensive data points to determine the impact of seasonal changes, local trends, and days of the week to provide the most optimal Airbnb daily rates.
- Vrbo hosts: The software works with Vrbo listings to set up the prices that allow hosts to boost occupancy and revenue and optimize ROI. The tool studies millions of Vrbo data points to pick up the effect of seasonality, local market, and days of the week and offer the ideal daily Vrbo rates based on them.
- Property managers: PriceLabs allows short term rental managers to grow their business by automating the process of dynamic pricing without sacrificing accuracy. Meanwhile, it allows managers to remain in control through customizable variables to ensure that they are comfortable with the suggested rates. Team management and collaboration features are available for short term rental management companies.
PriceLabs is NOT the right fit for real estate investors who are hoping to earn passive income from their short term rentals. While the tool has the capacity to help you save time and energy, it doesn’t eliminate the need to manage your property. The only way to achieve truly passive income is to hire one of the best Airbnb management companies in your local market.
PriceLabs can be used to price different types of rentals including:
- Vacation rentals and short term rentals
- Mid term rentals
- Aparthotels and serviced apartments
- Villas and chalets
- Campgrounds, RVs, and holiday parks
- Hotels
How PriceLabs Works
PriceLabs has developed a proprietary pricing algorithm named Hyper Local Pulse, or HLP. This algorithm uses hyper local data and insights to provide intelligent price recommendations that help increase revenue.
Based on a PriceLabs review, the platform offers four products that include:
Dynamic Pricing
Dynamic Pricing is at the core of the PriceLabs business. The PriceLabs Airbnb pricing tool eliminates the guesswork from pricing a vacation rental through a 3-step process.
First, PriceLabs collects data from Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com to analyze market demand and detect hyper local trends such as seasonality, days of the week, events and holidays, pacing, and lead time.
Next, the tool integrates your own listing’s historical performance and upcoming booking data to provide custom recommendations for each night for which the property is available for renting.
Finally, rates are synced across all booking channels directly or via third-party integrations. The process is repeated on a daily basis for the most accurate and up-to-date results.
Users can access the pricing calendar to check upcoming prices and to understand the breakdown of each price recommendation. They can track competitors - including hotels - pricing and compare their own future prices and occupancy rates to those of comps.
Airbnb hosts and property managers have the option to retain control over their pricing strategy by setting up a base price, determining a minimum and maximum price, selecting the minimum stay length, adding orphan day rules, overriding price and stay restrictions on specific dates, adjusting prices based on occupancy, and creating custom seasonal profiles.
Alternatively, they can opt in for just the most basic customization options to rely more heavily on the PriceLabs algorithm.
Portfolio Analytics
PriceLabs Portfolio Analytics delivers the most important vacation rental performance data and KPIs in real time. This tool can be used by hosts, especially those who own a few properties, but is generally targeted at property managers with portfolios of short term rentals.
Portfolio Analytics shows both listing and business level metrics. The listing performance data can be used to compare each individual property to other properties within the portfolio as well as to competitors’ listings in the area. Conclusions driven by this comparison can be utilized to make informed decisions about the optimal pricing strategy.
Additionally, property managers can access a bird’s eye view of the overall performance of their business. Some of the key metrics include monthly revenue and average stay length. These are some of the most important vacation rental data points needed to adjust both your pricing and marketing strategy.
Market Dashboards
PriceLabs Market Dashboards allow short term rental property operators to create and track custom lists of properties based on maps and filters. Areas and listings can be selected according to guest reviews, occupancy rates, bedroom count, amenities, owner-managed vs professionally managed, and other indicators.
These customized lists of properties can serve as the basis for comparing your property to peers as well as to the market average in order to further optimize your dynamic pricing strategy. Hosts who are interested in expanding their portfolio can also use this information to identify profitable areas and property types in addition to the best amenities for their future investments.
Revenue Estimator Pro
Finally, the PriceLabs Revenue Estimator Pro operates as an Airbnb calculator. It shows the expected monthly and annual income of a property before it’s even listed for renting. Seasonal trends are factored in to show how seasonality affects revenue. The Airbnb occupancy rate is estimated on the basis of local demand.
Property managers can use this PriceLabs feature to estimate the performance of a rental before deciding whether to work with it and onboarding it. In this way, they can focus on the rentals with the highest potential. Investors, on the other hand, can improve their investment decisions with data-driven insights.
PriceLabs Integrations
To deliver the services that it does, PriceLabs integrates with 100+ property management systems (PMS) and channel managers.
Some of the most important third-party PriceLabs integrations include:
- 365Villas
- AirHost
- Avantio
- BedLoop
- Beds24
- Bookerville
- Booking Automation
- Booking Experts
- BookingSync
- CiaoBooking
- Ciirus
- Cloudbeds
- Direct
- Escapia
- Eviivo
- Guesty
- Hospitable
- Host Tools
- Hostaway
- Hosteeva
- Hostfully
- Hosthub
- Hostify
- Hosty
- iGMS
- Kigo
- Kross Booking
- LiveRez
- LMPM
- Lodgify
- Lodgix
- MyVR
- Octorate
- Rentals United
- Smoobu
- Tokeet
- Uplisting
- Your.Rentals
PriceLabs Pros and Cons
The PriceLabs tool has significant advantages and disadvantages that hosts and property managers need to compare before making a decision.
The main PriceLabs pros include:
- Integration with both Airbnb and Vrbo
- Optimization of occupancy, revenue, and profit
- Multiple factors included in the pricing algorithms
- Integrations with major and less popular Airbnb management software
The key PriceLabs cons are:
- Complicated dashboard and options for beginners
- Occasionally wrong rates
- Complex pricing for multiple features
PriceLabs Reviews
Short term rental hosts and managers need to take into consideration what existing users think about PriceLabs before deciding if this is the best dynamic pricing tool for their needs. The fastest and most efficient way to do that is to look at customer reviews.
Online PriceLabs reviews are available on:
- Capterra: 4.9/5 stars based on 200 reviews
- GetApp: 4.9/5 stars based on 200 reviews
- Software Advice: 4.9/5 stars based on 200 reviews
- Trustpilot: 4.3/5 stars based on 63 reviews
PriceLabs has a good online reputation with hundreds of reviews by owners and property managers. The overall ratings on trustworthy third-party websites are positive.
Satisfied PriceLabs customers focus on the ease of use, the ability to solve dynamic pricing challenges, improved rankings in Airbnb SEO, boosts in occupancy and revenue, the seamless integrations with booking channels and management software, the multi-calendar view, the multi-unit setup, and the deep customization options.
Dissatisfied PriceLabs users complain about the unintuitive design, the complicated graphs, occasional data inaccuracies, need to manually adjust rates, unwillingness to accept feedback, and nonexistent customer support.
PriceLabs Alternatives and Competitors
A comprehensive PriceLabs review shows that the tool has the potential to facilitate short term rental pricing for hosts and property managers. Some customers, however, report frequent issues with the data that spark the question if this is the best pricing tool for Airbnb properties.
Following are the top PriceLabs competitors and alternatives.
Beyond vs PriceLabs
Beyond, formerly Beyond Pricing, is one of the closest competitors of PriceLabs. Beyond is a more comprehensive revenue management platform than PriceLabs as it goes above pure dynamic pricing and ventures into channel management and direct booking websites as well.
In terms of dynamic pricing algorithms, Beyond works in very much the same way, suggesting daily prices based on seasonality, search demand, local demand, and days of the week. Users can choose how much control to have over the overall pricing strategy via filters such as minimum, base, and maximum rates, minimum stays, extra guest fees, and price overrides.
Beyond works for both individual hosts and professional property managers.
Unlike PriceLabs, the Beyond pricing is set as a percentage of booking revenue. There are three different plans: Growth that costs 1% of booking fees, Pro that costs 1.25% of booking fees, and Guidance that costs 1.5% of booking fees. The difference in the three plans is the access to advanced tools.
All in all, Beyond looks like the better option for beginner hosts and short term rental property managers who are just getting started for the simplicity of tools.
Wheelhouse vs PriceLabs
Wheelhouse is a PriceLabs alternative that is known for the robustness of its data and rates accompanied by an easy-to-use platform that’s good for both beginners and more experienced vacation rental operators.
Wheelhouse offers dynamic pricing, market insights, performance analytics, and a navigator to stir hosts and property managers towards the right business decisions.
Wheelhouse provides three different dynamic pricing methods: data-driven, rule-based, and hybrid. This makes Wheelhouse the first and only Airbnb pricing software solution that allows hosts and managers to mix data-driven and rule-based pricing strategies for optimal results.
Users can customize multiple factors to truly personalize their strategy on the indicators that matter the most to them and to their property, including but not limited to base price, seasonality, last minute reservations, demand sensitivity, check-ins and check-outs, long term stays, and more.
Similar to PriceLabs, both short term rental property owners and managers can benefit from Wheelhouse.
Those managing 1-50 portfolios can choose between Pro Flex (1% of booking revenue) and Pro Flat ($19.99/month per listing) for the dynamic pricing tool. The dynamic sets plan costs $12.99/month per set.
AirDNA vs PriceLabs
AirDNA is one of the largest names in the short term rental data industry, and AirDNA Smart Rates is the alternative to the PriceLabs dynamic pricing tool.
AirDNA Smart Rates allows hosts and property managers to choose their priority: maximizing occupancy, having aggressive nightly rates, or in-between. Rates are updated on a daily basis to reflect analysis of seasonality, holidays, future demand, and competitor pricing trends.
The AirDNA dynamic pricing tool is used equally by owners and property managers with different portfolios.
AirDNA has a free plan for individual investors with limited capabilities including Smart Rates for 1 month ahead which is not enough for an efficient marketing strategy. The pricing of the standard plans reaches $85/month for 5 listings when billed monthly, while the cost of business plans is custom.
AirDNA Smart Rates doesn’t really stand out from PriceLabs in terms of dynamic pricing. Where the major difference between the two platforms comes from is the fact that the former has a much wider range of available data and tools for investors, hosts, and property managers.
Bottom Line
Our PriceLabs review shows that this is one of the most popular Airbnb dynamic pricing tools for all the right reasons. The platform takes on a multifaceted approach to setting up the optimal rates for vacation rentals including property-specific, competitor, and market-wide factors. There are ample opportunities for hosts and property managers to customize their strategy using the available filters. However, the platform might prove unnecessarily complicated, especially for beginners. Also, some customers report misleading rates that need to be manually adjusted for better results.
