Dynamic pricing is crucial for generating bookings, having a good occupancy rate, and maximizing revenue. Pricing strategies also require a lot of time and effort to implement. Wheelhouse is an Airbnb pricing tool that helps hosts and property managers put pricing on autopilot so that they can focus on other important aspects of the business. But is Wheelhouse worth it?
This Wheelhouse review covers everything about the product that short term rental operators need to know to decide if this is the right fit for their needs. This includes a detailed product overview, available features, pricing, third-party integrations, pros and cons, and customer reviews.
What Wheelhouse Is
Wheelhouse is one of the best Airbnb pricing tools available to vacation rental hosts and managers. This is a performant and highly customizable platform that has been designed with the needs of scaling hospitality operators in mind.
The personalization options make Wheelhouse an equally good fit for those managing a single property and those managing a portfolio of hundreds of rentals.
Wheelhouse is the first player in the industry that allows hosts and property managers to mix data-driven and rule-based vacation rental pricing techniques. In this way, they can create their own unique strategy that incorporates both data and rules to optimize the performance of their Airbnbs.
Andrew Kitchell founded Wheelhouse in 2014, and the company has its headquarters in San Francisco, CA. The company mission is to help hospitality teams build enduring businesses by being their most trusted and valued financial partner.
At the moment, Wheelhouse has more than 10,000 customers and covers over 1,500 markets. The tech-based company provides 7.2+ trillion short term rental data points.
Wheelhouse Pricing
Wheelhouse has a subscription-based pricing model. The Dynamic Pricing and the Dynamic Sets products are priced separately so that users can decide which product they need and pay only for the tools that they want to use.
Wheelhouse Dynamic Pricing
For Dynamic Pricing, hosts and property managers can choose between a commission-based fee and a flat fee.
- Pro Flex: 1% of booking revenue for a minimum monthly fee of $2.99. Discounts are applicable for 50+ listings.
- Pro Flat: $19.99/month per listing. The price drops to $16.99/month per listing for 10-49 listings, and there are further discounts for 50+ listings.
Managers with portfolios with 50+ listings receive custom quotes.
Wheelhouse Dynamic Sets
The cost of Dynamic Sets is $12.99/month per set.
You can start using the Wheelhouse platform for free by connecting your listings here. You will have to pay only after you decide to use a paid tier for a listing.
Customers can cancel their subscriptions at any point, after which they can use the platform until the plan’s final date.
Who Wheelhouse Is Best For
A Wheelhouse review shows that the platform could be a good fit for anyone managing between 1 and 5,000+ vacation rentals. It is capable of meeting the needs of individual hosts with one or a couple of short term rentals as well as professional property managers with hundreds or even thousands of listings under management.
For beginners and small operators, Wheelhouse offers the required simplicity to get started and to automate a crucial aspect of an individual Airbnb business. For professionals, Wheelhouse provides the expected power to optimize the vacation rental pricing strategy of multiple properties at once.
Having said that, Wheelhouse is not the right solution for short term rental property investors who are looking for passive income. While dynamic pricing is an important and time-consuming aspect of managing a vacation rental, there is a lot more that goes into a successful rental business.
Owners who would like to earn money passively should consider hiring one of the best Airbnb management companies.
How Wheelhouse Works
Wheelhouse features and data help hosts and property managers improve various aspects of vacation rental revenue. By leveraging Wheelhouse’s rules and automations, operators can increase revenue by 20%, on average.
Wheelhouse has 6 main features to optimize dynamic pricing.
Wheelhouse Dynamic Pricing
First and foremost, Wheelhouse provides an Airbnb dynamic pricing tool that ensures that listings are ideally priced in the ever-changing vacation rental market. What makes Wheelhouse different from other pricing tools available on the market is that users can mix data-driven and rule-based strategies.
The three pricing strategies Wheelhouse provides include:
- Data-driven pricing: The fully data-driven pricing strategy utilizes Wheelhouse’s award-winning pricing engine to guarantee that a listing is always perfectly priced for the current market. Hosts and property managers can automate their pricing strategy with a one-click activation after choosing their risk tolerance. Even with this automation, users can add rules and override rates on selected dates to retain control over their strategy. This is the best approach for beginner hosts and property managers who have limited knowledge of the local market and restricted access to reliable data sources.
- Rule-based pricing: The fully rule-based dynamic pricing strategy allows short term rental operators to remain in control while leveraging Wheelhouse’s data and platform. Users can create multiple rules and adjust 14 settings. Wheelhouse customers can also use more advanced factors such as occupancy pacing and revenue pacing to adjust nightly rates based on occupancy and lead time or revenue and lead time, respectively. This approach is best for experienced hosts and property managers with a clear understanding of local market dynamics.
- Hybrid pricing: With the hybrid pricing strategy, owners and managers can get the best of both worlds by choosing how and when to leverage data-driven rates and when to apply adjustments. This is the optimal approach for those with some knowledge of the local Airbnb market and industry but limited time availability.
Holidays, weekends, and special occasions present opportunities for Airbnb investors to earn additional revenue as a result of increased demand. Even during low season they can continue to generate income with the right daily rates. With Wheelhouse, you can fine-tune pricing on specific days via a percent adjustment above or below the recommended rate or a fixed rate.
The Wheelhouse pricing engine comes with additional features to further facilitate the work of managers including notes to communicate with team members, reminders to check on different issues, changelog to review edits, alerts to pay attention to new competitors and changing market conditions, exportable images and tables to deeply analyze data, and model insights to comprehend all aspects of demand.
Wheelhouse Dynamic Sets
Unlike traditional comp sets, dynamic sets allow for accessing multiple markets, multiple categories, precise operator and amenity filters, and numerous comps all at once. Airbnb hosts and managers can build versatile, customizable sets of comps that meet their exact criteria.
The dynamic sets provide background for comparing your own listing’s performance with the performance of competitors. Moreover, they can be used to draw conclusions about the current trends in the local market and what amenities or marketing strategies drive the strongest results for local operators. Hosts and managers can use them to upgrade their properties and to enhance their pricing and marketing plans.
Wheelhouse Performance Analytics
The Performance Analytics feature of Wheelhouse helps operators with multiple listings analyze and track the performance of their entire portfolio at once. With visualized data, it’s easy to check whether bookings and revenue are going up or down and whether you’re on track to achieve your goals for the month. Moreover, the tool allows you to keep an eye on budget indicators to run a financially aware business.
You can also set up A/B tests to understand the effect that price limits, minimum stays, cancellation policies, and other factors have on the performance of your specific property. After all, each rental is unique, and best practices do not necessarily drive the most optimal results each and every time.
Wheelhouse Market Insights
The Wheelhouse Market Insights allow hosts and property managers to access historical, real-time, and future data to discover the best opportunities in the market and mitigate risk. The data visualizations clearly display historic patterns as well as shifting trends. Meanwhile, the Wheelhouse occupancy projections help predict future occupancy and new pricing opportunities.
Wheelhouse Navigator
Navigator is the newest Wheelhouse tool which maps data in a way that makes it easy to make sense of complicated data sets in any location. Airbnb managers can configure the filters to prioritize the categories and metrics that matter the most to them for dynamic visualizations that colorize listings on maps with multiple graphs. All this means that hosts can benchmark their properties, compare prices to competitors, track performance over time, and ultimately boost their strategy.
Wheelhouse APIs
Larger-scale operators can use the Wheelhouse Pricing API to integrate the price recommendations directly into their own website or booking system. Additionally, the Demand Signal API can be used to generate demand insights for future stay dates.
The Comparable Set API shows existing comp sets for a listing. Finally, the Just-in-Time-Pricing API allows users to get a price recommendation for a listing on demand without the need to create a unit and upload a calendar for a more efficient reference.
For all tools and features, Wheelhouse offers continuous customer support via a 24/7 live chat. The in-house onboarding and training team help users set up and get started in the optimal way for their business. Personal account management is available for growing property management teams. Finally, the Wheelhouse website provides a range of educational and training resources.
Wheelhouse Integrations
Wheelhouse integrates with leading booking channels, OTAs, property management software solutions, and channel managers to deliver best-in-class services. Moreover, hosts and property managers can request a specific integration if it’s not already available to accommodate their needs.
Current Wheelhouse integrations include:
- Airbnb
- AvantStay
- Barefoot
- Best Beach Getaways
- CiiRUS
- Enso Connect
- Escapia
- Guesty
- Hospitable
- Hostaway
- Hosteeva
- Hostfully
- Hosty
- iGMS
- Jetstream
- Jurny
- LMPM
- MadeComfy
- Natural Retreats
- Overmoon
- OwnerRez
- Rentals United
- Smily
- Smoobu
- Streamline
- Tempo
- Tokeet
- Track
- TripAdvisor
- Uplisting
- Veeve
- VRWorks
- Wander
- yourrentl
Wheelhouse Pros and Cons
The Wheelhouse platform has a lot of advantages over competitors but also some disadvantages that hosts and managers need to take into account when making a decision.
The most important benefits of using Wheelhouse include:
- Comprehensive revenue management automation
- Flexible Airbnb pricing strategy
- Good fit for both hosts and property managers
- Scalability along with a vacation rental management business
- Direct integration with Airbnb
- Integrations with widely used short term rental management software products
- Flexible product price
The most considerable drawbacks of Wheelhouse are:
- No direct integration with Vrbo and Booking.com (done via a third-party PMS)
- Separate pricing for different products
Wheelhouse Reviews
Checking out what existing customers think about Wheelhouse can give you insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the product and help you decide if this is the right choice for your business.
Online Wheelhouse reviews are available on:
- Capterra: 4.8/5 stars from 163 reviews
- GetApp: 4.8/5 stars from 163 reviews
- Trustpilot: 4.5/5 stars from 127 reviews
- G2: 5.0/5 stars from 58 reviews
All in all, Wheelhouse has a solid online presence with 500+ customer reviews that show generally very positive experiences. Average ratings are high.
Positive reviews of the Wheelhouse app focus on the robust features, the effective pricing system compared to alternative products, the accurate rate suggestions, the flexibility, the ease of use, the significant increases in occupancy and revenue after implementation, the help and support tutorials, and the great customer support.
Negative Wheelhouse reviews highlight technical bugs, underestimated prices, problems with the Airbnb integration, and the lack of Vrbo integration.
Wheelhouse Alternatives and Competitors
A detailed Wheelhouse review shows that this product is able to help different types of vacation rental operators automate and optimize dynamic pricing for their portfolios. Nevertheless, some hosts and property managers might want to check out alternative options before committing to this tool.
Following are the most popular Wheelhouse competitors.
Beyond vs Wheelhouse
Beyond, formerly Beyond Pricing, is one of the best-known Airbnb pricing tools that is used by both hosts and professional managers. Among competitors, Beyond stands out with its simplicity, which makes it a better fit for beginner and small-scale hosts rather than managers with multiple rentals.
Beyond has developed a dynamic pricing algorithm that takes into consideration multiple factors to suggest the best price for each night. Some key factors include seasonality, search demand, local demand, and days of the week. The tool allows users to set up base price and price range, minimum stay length, extra guest fees, gap adjustments, and other filters. However, Beyond doesn’t have the same functionality to choose between a data-driven strategy and a rule-based strategy or a mix between the two as Wheelhouse does.
Beyond has three pricing plans. The cost starts at 1% of booking revenue and reaches 1.5% for access to more tools which makes it more expensive than Wheelhouse.
PriceLabs vs Wheelhouse
PriceLabs is a dynamic pricing and revenue management system that works for small and large portfolios.
The PriceLabs Hyper Local Pulse (HLP) algorithm collects data from active listings and detects hyper local trends based on seasonality, days of the week, events and holidays, pacing, and lead time. Then the algorithm proposes the nightly rates that can optimize bookings and income. Users can adjust the base, minimum, and maximum price, the minimum stay, orphan day pricing, and other factors.
The cost of the PriceLabs dynamic pricing feature starts at $19.99/month, and a commission-based plan equivalent to 1% of booking revenue is also available. Additional PriceLabs products have separate prices.
AirDNA vs Wheelhouse
AirDNA Smart Rates is the AirDNA alternative to Wheelhouse Dynamic Pricing. This Airbnb pricing tool helps automate pricing in a way that maximizes revenue.
AirDNA Smart Rates uses trends in the local short term rental market data to propose custom rates for each night when a property is available for rent. Some of the main factors behind the AirDNA algorithm include days of the week, seasonal trends, market demand, and lead time. Hosts and property managers can choose between a strategy that maximizes Airbnb occupancy rate or more aggressive nightly rates in an attempt to maximize revenue instead.
AirDNA has a free plan with which users can get Smart Rate recommendations for one month ahead, but the full-scale dynamic pricing tool is not available. Dynamic pricing for 1 property costs $40/month when billed annually, while the cost is $85/month for 5 listings. The pricing of business-level plans is custom.
Bottom Line
Our Wheelhouse review reveals that this software tool has all the functions expected from the best Airbnb pricing and revenue management product. The tool relies on trustworthy data and applies an award-winning algorithm that helps operators boost revenue with 20%, on average. Wheelhouse offers more flexibility and customization options than competitors so that hosts and property managers can fully personalize their vacation rental pricing strategy based on market dynamic as well as their own knowledge of the area. Customers praise the user-friendly interface and the accurate recommended rates.
