Being smart with your pricing is key to increasing the profitability of your vacation rental business. Luckily, Proptech is here to help to optimize your rates, so you don’t have to spend long hours conducting market research, analyzing competitors’ prices, and trends in the industry.
With this in mind, we’re excited to announce our brand-new integration with one of the most powerful dynamic pricing tools on the market — Pricelabs. Now, you can rest assured that you won’t lose out on potential revenue on any of your properties as the integration with Pricelabs enables you to apply dynamic rates and min stay rules across all your connected channels: Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com.
Not an iGMS customer yet? It’s a great time to join! As travel has started to bounce back to the pre-pandemic levels, it’s important to brush up on your property management strategy. Make the most of the upcoming high season by harnessing the power of automation.
Pricelabs is an advanced web-based revenue management and dynamic pricing software for vacation and short-term rentals. Pricelabs’ data-driven approach, automation rules, and customizations to manage pricing and availability settings help vacation rental hosts across the globe increase their revenue and save them hours of work.
Based in Chicago, Illinois, the company was founded by college mates Richie Khandelwal and Anurag Verma. The concept of the company was born back in 2014. Being an Airbnb host, Richie Khandelwal was frustrated by how complex it was to manage pricing on this platform to match frequent market fluctuations. Currently, Pricelabs continues growing while helping thousands of hosts implement dynamic pricing strategies in their businesses.
If you use iGMS, you are already on the right track to success. As iGMS is an indispensable software solution that streamlines plenty of essential hosting tasks, vacation rental hosts and property managers have more time to scale their businesses while reducing operational expenses. Our partnership with Pricelabs enables hosts to go one step further in maximizing their revenue potential.
By having these two tools integrated, you can feed two birds with one scone — run your vacation rental business like a pro and keep your rates competitive and optimized for maximum revenue. Let’s take a look at how Pricelabs generates its pricing suggestions and how you can use them to your advantage:
You don’t have to be a data expert or hire one to set the right price for your listing and tweak it in the face of market fluctuations. Pricelabs analyzes price-influencing factors to suggest which rates would be the best at this very moment. These factors include:
This capability is incredibly convenient to hosts who handle multiple listings. Managing rates for multiple listings is easier with Pricelabs as you can adjust them in bulk using group and account level customizations.
You can still be in control of your rates and override pricing suggestions if you disagree with them. The tool enables you to set discounts for last-minute bookings, reduce pricing for orphan days (this way, you can fill small gaps in your calendar), make occupancy-based adjustments when your listing goes beyond a set occupancy threshold, and a lot more.
The tool will automatically track how frequently your listing is getting booked and adjust the min-stay setting to ensure that no dates end up being vacant. This way, you can rest assured that you utilize your rental’s potential to the fullest.
To enable the connection between Pricelabs and iGMS, you should go to your Pricelabs account. However, before doing so, make sure that your properties managed via iGMS have the correct geographical location. This information is crucial for Pricelabs to generate accurate pricing suggestions and availability settings since they should be specific to your area.
Once you have selected the correct locations for your properties, follow the steps described in this how-to article to start using the integration.
To take advantage of the integration within the iGMS system, you need to have a working account with Pricelabs. If you haven’t signed up for Pricelabs yet, you can do it here.
As you will be putting both iGMS’ as well as Pricelabs’ unique capabilities and services to good use, you will need to pay for your subscriptions separately. The good news is that no extra charges will apply for utilizing the secure and stable connection between these two tools.
Once you have successfully enabled the connection between Pricelabs and iGMS, go to your Pricelabs dashboard to check the rates suggested by the tool. If these suggestions look reasonable and you want to update your listings with the new rates, toggle on the switch sync in your PriceLabs dashboard and wait for the regular nightly sync, or click on the ‘Sync now!’ button to push your rates and min stay settings to iGMS.
The adjusted rates will be visible in the iGMS Multi-calendar and Single Property Calendar. However, if you think your rates need to be changed, you should go directly to the Pricelabs account again, as this is where all the dynamic pricing magic happens. Keep in mind that your rates and min stay rules will be synchronized to iGMS every 4 hours. This frequency is regulated on Pricelabs’ side and cannot be adjusted manually on iGMS.
At iGMS, we never cease to develop new product enhancements and grow our partners’ network so you, as a host, can become even savvier in your property management and increase your ROI. If you are not with iGMS yet, we invite you to try our software in action by signing up for a free 14-day trial. We also offer a free onboarding session so you can get to grips with automation from the get-go.