We're pleased to announce that we're now connected with Zeevou, an easy-to-use online platform that automates hospitality management - from marketing, to bookings, to operations. Replace your traditional channel manager and property management system with one unified hub.

Using PriceLabs with Zeevou is easy:

1. Enable PriceLabs in Zeevou
2. Sign up for PriceLabs or log in to your existing PriceLabs account.
   Once logged in to your account, click on Connect to your Airbnb/PMS account and select Zeevou.
3. You will be asked for your Zeevou Username and Zeevou API key.
4. Go to Zeevou Set -> Pricing Module Integration, and copy your username and API key.
5. Return to PriceLabs, enter your API details, and click on Login.

You'll now see your Zeevou listings in your PriceLabs dashboard! From here, follow our onboarding guide to familiarize yourself with PriceLabs and get started!

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to email support@pricelabs.co or info@zeevou.com

Smoobu is the easy and efficient vacation rental software. Available in desktop version and mobile app, Smoobu offers several tools to automatize property managers’ daily tasks. Smoobu guarantees an intuitive user experience and hassle-free set up.

Smoobu enables you to have your PriceLabs rates send to the major bookings portals such as Airbnb, Booking.com, Agoda, Expedia and others.

Smoobu’s clean dashboard allows you to view all current bookings at a glance. Also the automated communication tool reduces the average time you spend with dealing with guests. Using Smoobu’s booking tool will allow you to receive direct bookings, either from your existing website or by creating a new one with Smoobu’s website builder.

This easy integration allows Smoobu users to import their properties to PriceLabs and see the recommended prices almost instantaneously.

Note: Smoobu requires each property to have a complete address including the latitude and longitude, the number of rooms and bathrooms, and the size entered on the listing page. Please make sure each listing has this information before you start the integration process.

Follow these steps to integrate your accounts:

Step 1: Log in to your Smoobu account and click on External Integration from the Settings page. Select Pricelabs then click on Connect and add

Step 2: Once you have gotten your API key, log in to your PriceLabs account and click the big blue button

Step 3: Select Smoobu from the drop-down menu and enter your API key

Easy peasy! You should now see all your listings in the PriceLabs dashboard and see PriceLabs pricing on your Smoobu calendar.

Our onboarding guide has info on how to review prices, set appropriate parameters, make adjustments etc. And you can always reach out to support@pricelabs.co if you have any questions.

Questions about Smoobu? Drop an email to info@smoobu.com. If you are a Smoobu user, go to your session and click on Help – Support

We are pleased to announce that we've added Direct™ to our growing list of PMS integrations. Direct™ is the forward-thinking, do-everything platform for lodging management companies of all sizes worldwide. The Direct™ next-gen software platform adds tremendous value bringing every feature necessary to run a business under one roof by consolidating or replacing the functionalities altogether, enabling companies to generate more revenue, with less effort, and at a lower cost than they can with competing platforms.

To start the integration process with Direct, you must first reach out to support@getdirect.io to request your API key. Once you have received your API key from Direct™, follow these simple steps to integrate your accounts:

Step 1. From your Direct™ dashboard, click on your organization icon and select Settings from the pop-up menu.

Then click to enable the PriceLabs integration and note your Organization ID.

Step 2. Log in to your PriceLabs account and press the big blue button to start the integration process on our end.

Select Direct from the drop-down menu and enter your Organization ID and API key in the integrations box.

You will now see your Direct™ listings in your PriceLabs dashboard! Spend some time setting up your initial price and minimum stay customizations (check out our Getting Started guide if you need some inspiration). Once you're happy with what you have, and after you have saved all of your settings, turn on the sync switch. You can either wait for the nightly sync or hit Sync Now! to sync your accounts immediately. After everything has synced, you can head back over to your Direct™ listings and you'll see your PriceLabs pricing on your listing calendar.

Feel free to reach out to us at support@pricelabs.co if you have any questions or need any help!

A 30 minute demo highlighting the features PriceLabs has to offer and how to use our software to achieve higher rates and occupancy for your vacation rentals. Each interactive session is followed by a Q&A which will last until all questions are answered.

Register for a session using the links below.

Recorded session (listen at your own pace):

• Watch now

North & South America timezones:

• Tuesday, October 22, 12:00PM PDT
• Thursday, October 24, 12:00PM PDT

European timezones:

• Friday, October 25, 2:00PM CEST

Today, we hear from Christian Eriksen, one of the Co-Founders of Nord Collection. Nord Collection uses PriceLabs with Guesty to distribute dynamic prices and min-stay to all their channels like Airbnb, Booking.com, Homeaway etc.!

"We manage 100+ listings in Copenhagen and have a few ApartHotels on the way, 3 buildings with a total of 70 apartments."

As a property management company we receive a cut of the revenue. Very quickly we realized that a very large proportion of our costs were one-time costs associated with one booking, hence a 1-day booking is almost as expensive for us as a 7-day booking is.

Until we found PriceLabs we used to allow for all length of stay and we were pricing all listings ourselves. This meant a lot of 1-2 and to night stays.

"Using the features of PriceLabs we managed to grow our average length of stay from 3.1 nights to 4.3 nights, an increase of almost 40%. In the same period we grew the revenue of the same listings with 10%+, even though we had much fewer (but longer) stays."

Except for all the hassle and costs associated with handling a booking there’s a very big indirect cost: Small bookings will generate you very little revenue but still block a number of other possible stays. E.g. a 1- night booking from Saturday to Sunday will block a long stay over the weekend.

This effect is drastically underestimated by many in the short term rental industry but has the potential to grow revenue more than most other initiatives.

In our company we use the settings of PriceLabs to do this:

• Putting a relatively high minimum stay (4) for stays very far into the future
• Allowing for 3-nights stay for bookings in the middle
• Allowing for down to 1-night stay in the very near future

The most important setting, however, is the orphan day discount, that enables you to actively fill up the gaps, that are left un-booked. It’s a highly effective tool that’ll give you much higher occupancy.

Minimum stay for orphan bookings

The big threat of a putting minimum stay rules is that you’re left with days that are un-bookable. To account for this use the “minimum stay for orphan bookings”-setting. This will allow you to receive shorter stays in periods, where there are only a few days available.

"Compared to other price optimization services PriceLabs offers a wide spectrum of functionalities, e.g. the possibility of setting dynamic rules for the minimum number of stays. My company manage 100+ Airbnb rentals and after our partnership with PriceLabs we've seen a big increase in revenues as well as a smaller workload for us."

We're super excited to be announcing a big improvement over our older base price help section - if you hadn't been using it, you should now!

Base Price is the starting point for all price recommendations in PriceLabs. However, it can be a challenge for property managers to tune this parameter because there are so many factors that go into it:

• What is the average price in your area?

• How are prices compared to comps? How does occupancy compare?

• How are listings priced in the next months? Are they getting booked?

• Are there certain dates that are getting booked more than others? Are other listings in your immediate neighborhood increasing prices for peak demand?

This new Base Price Help can be used to investigate the answer to some of these questions. Even though there are a number of other factors that can affect how Base Prices are set, we hope that this hyper-local data will be a convenient place for PriceLabs' users to explore market trends.

To access it, click on the "Base Price Help" on the Review Prices page of one of your listings to open up a screen with four useful charts (screenshot below). Note that all prices will be in the same currency as your listing's.

Average Price And Occupancy

The first two plots show the average price and occupancy for listings in your area in the next 180 days.

• The first plot shows the breakdown across different listing categories and how they are priced: as an example, from the picture below, we find that 9 3BR listings whose average price over the next 6 months is between $260 and $310.
• The second plot shows the occupancy of listings in the same category/price-range as in the first chart: as an example, over the next 6 months, the 9 3BR listings in the $260-$310 range are booked 59% - note that the eventual occupancy of those 6 months might be larger.

Drill Down

One feedback we got from a lot of users last year was that on the higher end properties (4BR or 5+ BR in this example), the price ranges were not small enough.

The "Number of Bedrooms" menu filters the data by the number of bedrooms across all charts, and can be used to drill down on the neighborhood data and gain some mode resolution. If you wanted to see a particular bedroom category, and it is not available, it might be because the number of listings in this category in not significant in this area.

Trends

This is the big addition to this section! The next two plots show price and occupancy trends over the next 6 months, and can help you identify where there are demand surges (though our algorithm will automatically adjust your prices to it), and when others are raising their rates. You can use this to apply date specific overrides if needed.

• The price trends show the 25th, 50th and 75th percentiles of prices, which indicates what's considered a low price, average price, and high price for listings in your area. Note that if you use the filters to drill down, then the prices will be for that category.
• The occupancy trend shows how occupied each category is on a particular date.

Notes

• Base Price Help shows aggregated data from a limited number of listings in the immediate surrounding area, and it is not intended for market research.
• This aggregate data might contain listings with different fee structures - fees are usually added on top of the prices used for this analysis, but not always. Therefore, there is some amount of uncertainty in the data and these numbers should be interpreted as trends.

If you have a question, user experience or feedback for us, send a mail to support@pricelabs.co. We love hearing from you.

Today, we will discuss with Marco Malafante, President and Co-Founder of The Red House Company. The Red House Company uses PriceLabs with SuperControl to not just have dynamic pricing on their direct booking website, but also to several Online Travel Agencies (OTAs).

“Red House” is the name of the very first property that we set up for tourist rental. After years of constant growth and development, the company now manages more than 40 prestigious properties. The objective of the company is to enhance real estate investments in the city of Venice, offering new service standards to both visitors and homeowners."

Marco, let's discuss together and share your feedback on using Pricelabs at The Red House Company.

First of all, who in your company was in charge of implementing PriceLabs?

Myself Marco Malafante owner and general manager of The Red House Co.

Can you tell us quickly what was the context of your company before using PriceLabs?

Before taking on PriceLabs we had a pricing system based on 4 seasons, and it was pretty static. We understood we were missing out on sophistication that the airlines and large hotel chains have on this front.

In terms of sophistication, we don't compare ourselves to local hotels and B&Bs, but to large sophisticated hotel chains. We are a company that aspires to become much bigger and we have structured ourselves as a company that can scale all its departments organically.

What were the goals you wanted to achieve by using a dynamic pricing tool?

When some of our competition started using dynamic pricing, we began losing money because other properties modulated the prices according to supply and demand and we were stuck in a fix price system. Using a dynamic pricing as well has allowed us to take back that profit.

We wanted to match the seasonality more effectively day by day and not quarterly, we wanted to maximize the weekly trend on every week knowing that every week is different.

Another important goal for us was to produce a sort of automated promotion that trigger 10 days before the dates available generating last minute deals with different minimum stay and price per property. Now we're able to automate that thanks to PriceLabs.

We also wanted to make special offers on the orphan dates, and PriceLabs helps us to do this with a dedicated section where we can decide property by property to apply discount and minimum stay on a given amount of available dates between the bookings.

What were the reasons that led you to try and use a dynamic pricing tool?

At the time the Channel Managers and PMS we used did not have dynamic pricing embedded, and the ones did tended to be dedicated to larger organization with impossibly high requests of percentage of the revenue as payments.

We didn't try dynamic pricing tools in the past because despite the fact that the dynamic pricing systems do increase revenue, the total cost was absolutely unacceptable.

How was the configuration of PriceLabs for your company?

It was extremely easy. We just had to transfer the pricing we had on seasonality for its minimum and its maximum number, then we spent few months monitoring where the base price should have been and we checked regularly the performance of the properties compared to the other similar apartments and the previous year performances.

Currently we adjust settings in PriceLabs every 2 to 3 months and only for a subset of properties, maybe 30% of our portfolio.

Which features in PriceLabs you like the most?

The fact that they monitor price and availability on the most important OTAs in the world - which represent the overall market trends.

This only make me feel safe by knowing that the trend of my pricing is checked and matched with the whole TAM (Total Available Market) and not by a simple math algorithm that do not take consideration of public, school, local and one off holidays.

There are events and there are seasons, there are repetitive situations or unique ones. The market feels this and if a tool is not strictly attached to it, you will never be able to maximise your revenue and profit from them all.

Monitoring these OTA does give you the right trend of the following month, season and year.

If you compare to your initial situation, without using PriceLabs, what benefits did you get? What concrete results do you see on a daily basis?

The improvement is measurable in different sections of the business:

• We can improve the occupancy
• We can offer specials for last minute and orphan dates
• We make our home owners happy by increasing occupancy in the low seasons dates at a very convenient price - though the margins for us are lower due to the lower price. These are enjoyed mostly by retired travelers, people looking to spend long periods in Venice, and young travelers that love to take last minute decisions.

On a daily basis our office has been relieved of the heavyweight work of having to manually modify pricing on several properties. Basically between seasonal changes, price adjustments and special deals on apartments that were suffering lack of bookings, we were spending a lot of time on adjusting prices in our channel manager.

We're excited to announce that PriceLabs is now integrated with Elina PMS, a powerful property management software for hotels and serviced apartments with 10 - 1,000 rooms, whether single or multi location. Build your growth platform property management system, channel manager, guest login and booking engine with 70+ integrated app or services. All customers get phone and email support plus a help desk with guides, videos and FAQs included.

Using PriceLabs with Elina PMS: For using PriceLabs with Elina, please follow the steps below:

1. Reach out to Elina PMS at elinacares@elinapms.com and request a connection to PriceLabs. You will also be provided with
   
   • Your subdomain (which is the first part of the URL that you login at)
   • Your username and password
2. In Elina PMS, Setup the Geo-location for all your listings that you want to use PriceLabs for. Note that accurate location information is needed by PriceLabs.
   
   • Step 1
   • Step 2
   • Step 3
3. Come to PriceLabs, and follow our onboarding guide. In Step 2 of that guide, choose Elina PMS and enter the information below:
4. You should now see all your listings in the PriceLabs dashboard! Our onboarding guide has info on how to review prices, set appropriate parameter, make adjustments etc.
5. Once ready, you can sync prices back to Elina. You can view the prices we updated in Elina once the sync is done - it should look like the screenshot below!

That's it! If you have any questions, please reach out to support@pricelabs.co or elinacares@elinapms.com.

Note 1: For PriceLabs to sync prices to Lodgify, it is important that min-stay be specified for each date in PriceLabs. For more information on how to do this, please read setting dynamic min-stay from PriceLabs.

Note 2: Listings in your Lodgify account need to be associated with the Lodgify booking website already to be accessible in PriceLabs.

We're excited to be integrated with Lodgify - it has everything you need to create a vacation rental website and manage all your bookings. Their advanced vacation rental software provides owners and property managers with the tools needed to build a beautiful website, accept online bookings with credit card payments and manage all your reservations from one place. Their sophisticated solution allows synchronization of property data with external booking channels such as Airbnb and Booking.com.

Using PriceLabs with Lodgify is easy:

1. Obtain your Lodgify User ID and API key using the steps below
   
   • UserID is a number (and not an email)
   • API key

2. Enter the Lodgify UserID and API key in step 2 of our on-boarding guide. When the listings import, you will get a warning telling you that having min-stay set in PriceLabs is important.

3. Review prices for your listings, adjust any base/min/max prices, date specific overrides, and customizations.

4. Before syncing any prices back,

   • Make sure you've set a default min-stay settings from PriceLabs, as the sync with Lodgify requires min-stay to be sent from PriceLabs. You can also setup advanced min-stay settings, or date specific min-stay settings - the instructions can be found on the link above.
   • Please apply extra guest fees from PriceLabs - the existing extra guest fee in Lodgify will not get used otherwise.
   • Turn on “External Rates” inside Lodgify:
     1. Login to Lodgify
     2. In the menu, Click on "General settings" and then the "External rates" section
     3. Toggle ''Use external rates'' for the desired property
5. Once PriceLabs has synced prices, you can verify that by going to Lodgify's multi-calendar view and turning on the price option. You can also verify that the weekly and monthly discounts are working fine by generating a quote for a longer period.

That's it! You're now good to go! If you have any questions, please reach out to

• PriceLabs support at support@pricelabs.co
• Lodgify support via https://help.lodgify.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

We're excited to announce that PriceLabs is now integrated with 365villas, a leading provider of cloud-based Property Management Software (PMS), servicing the global short-stay rental market, including vacation rental, Airbnb and other related segments. Their users own or manage property portfolio of all sizes in over 60 countries and counting.

In addition to their leading PMS platform they provide complementary solutions and services such as integrated websites, channel manager, revenue management, online booking and payment solutions.

Their ongoing mission is to provide the world’s best equilibrium between comprehensive feature-functionality, ease of use, and cost-benefit for their users.

How to integrate PriceLabs with 365Villas

1. Head over to your 365Villas account, and get your API key and token from the API integrations page

2. Follow directions in our on-boarding guide - use the API Key and Pass in step 2.

3. If you've followed all the steps in the onboarding guide, and want to check if the prices and min-stay are updated, you can head over to the Rates Table page in 365Villas.

   You will find the rates we updated as in the screenshot below.

That's it! You're all set with the integration. As always, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to support@pricelabs.co or support@365villas.com.

We are excited to announce our integration with Rentlio, a cloud-based app tailor-made for vacation rentals, small hotels, hostels, and hospitality property managers. Rentlio is a fast and reliable property management system & channel manager with an easy-to-use UI and beautiful design. To borrow it from The State of UX in 2019:

UX is not only about the times when people are using their products, but also about the times when they are not. In the era of ever-vibrating smartphones and increasingly demanding apps, there is no better user experience than peace of mind.

Rentlio users have the peace of mind of not having to worry about overbookings or communication with users thanks to predefined e-mail templates.

Helping Property Managers Manage Their Revenue Better Rentlio users can now use this integration to take advantage of PriceLabs’ data-driven pricing and push optimized rates to OTAs.

By harnessing the power of PriceLabs predictive analytics and automation, a property manager doesn’t have to worry about positioning themselves competitively through an ‘educated guess’. PriceLabs takes into account hundreds of pricing factors (such as historical booking trends for vacation rentals and hotels around the world) to optimize your property pricing for success. As Rentlio’s CEO, Marko Mišulić states:

For technology to dive deeply into the hospitality industry, Property Management Systems need to become more open to different software and tool integrations to allow their users best toolsets based on their needs. PriceLabs integration with Rentlio is the right step in that direction.’

How to integrate Rentlio and PriceLabs? Follow the simple steps to connect your Rentlio account with PriceLabs:

1. Login to your Rentlio account and generate your API key
2. Follow the steps in the PriceLabs on-boarding guide (step #2 is where you'll need to select Rentlio and enter the API key).

Feel free to email support@pricelabs.co or hello@rentl.io with any questions, or if you need a quick call or demo to clarify how everything works. Also, you can always reach out to Rentlio with any questions or try the app 30 days free if you’re new to it :)