Data-driven vacation rental pricing enables you to maximize your revenue and grow your bottom line in a competitive market. However, we know firsthand that pricing management can be incredibly challenging. To help you overcome the complexity of managing your rates, we keep expanding our list of integrations with dynamic pricing tools.
This month we are thrilled to announce that we have partnered up with Wheelhouse, a dynamic pricing tool that uses real-time insights and machine learning to ensure your rates are competitive all year round.
Not an iGMS customer yet? While the demand for vacation rentals is booming, it is a great time to join to make the most out of the current high season.
Wheelhouse is a powerful dynamic pricing software solution that optimizes your prices automatically by analyzing over 10 billion data points daily. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and is helping thousands of entrepreneurs in 475+ markets across 10+ countries. Wheelhouse is the only team with Ph.D. Data Scientists designing hotel-level pricing tools for short-term rentals.
Wheelhouse’s mission is “to turn hosts and homeowners into superheroes” and help you manage short-term rental properties as professionally and efficiently as major hotels. Therefore, they built a platform that enables hosts to understand their properties’ performance better and set competitive rates.
According to Wheelhouse, their customers are able to generate up to 40% more revenue and scale their businesses more effectively with actionable data on hand.
As a host, you know that growing your business does not only take a lot of effort but requires plenty of time. Using vacation rental software such iGMS has become a real game-changer for many hosts, as it helps to streamline multiple operations and save tons of time.
With our integration with Wheelhouse, you get the best of both worlds – you can rest assured that all your daily tasks are automated, and your pricing is being adjusted on all your accounts connected to iGMS in response to spikes in demand.
Let’s take a more detailed look at how this integration can be beneficial to you.
Coming up with adequate pricing for your rental is not an easy task. There is an endless number of data points that you need to analyze to identify the best pricing for your offering. Wheelhouse does this job for you and helps you come up with the most appropriate pricing for your rental.
Furthermore, it optimizes your rates as per market fluctuations every 24 hours. For example, if there is a sudden change in the demand, Wheelhouse will make sure your property is prepared to capitalize on it by adjusting your pricing.
Another factor that every host should consider is how much your competitors charge for their vacation rentals. To attract more bookings, hosts tend to fall into the trap of undervaluing their properties. Wheelhouse monitors your competitors’ rates and ensures that you don’t leave money on the table while keeping your calendar full.
Whether you are a single-property host or a property manager with hundreds or even thousands of listings, Wheelhouse caters to every segment of vacation rental professionals.
You can either go for a set-and-forget-it approach and entrust your pricing management to Wheelhouse completely or personalize your strategy by customizing a variety of settings for each of your units. These settings include base price, minimum stay, minimum and maximum prices, discounts, etc. Once you have customized them to your liking, you can preview the impact of your adjustments on your pricing strategy before you set it on.
In addition, Wheelhouse offers you a choice on how aggressively you would like your pricing strategy to be implemented. You can decide whether you want to prioritize occupancy over your earning potential, keep them in balance, place priority on your average daily rate, or set your own goals.
You don’t need to access every platform where your properties are listed to implement pricing suggestions. If you manage your properties on iGMS, pricing recommendations will be pushed automatically to all your units without your involvement. The synchronization of the rates on iGMS will take place every 4 hours for all the properties on the given account.
The end goal of automated pricing management is to ensure that you make the most of what you have while saving your time on market research and in-depth data analysis. As Wheelhouse tracks various factors every day and delivers data-driven pricing suggestions, you can expect higher earnings.
Another advantage is that you can still remain in control of your pricing management. You can monitor the performance of your rental in real time and tweak your settings on the go.
To start leveraging the integration, you should first log in to your iGMS and Wheelhouse accounts. This will help to ensure a stable connection between the two platforms. After you have logged in, make sure to group listings of the same property on iGMS so that Wheelhouse pricing suggestions will be applied correctly to all your listings on various platforms.
To complete the integration, follow the steps detailed in this how-to article.
To utilize the integration, you need to have an account with Wheelhouse. You can either connect an existing Wheelhouse account to iGMS or create a new one. If you already have an active account with Wheelhouse, you will be asked to enter your User API Key. If you want to create a new account, you can also do so within the iGMS dashboard.
Note that due to security reasons, by default, the iGMS account holder’s email address will be used when setting up a new Wheelhouse account.
As you will be harnessing the unique functionalities of both iGMS and Wheelhouse software solutions, you will need to pay for your subscriptions separately. The good part is that no extra charges will apply for using the secure and stable connection between these two tools.
Once you have established the connection between iGMS and Wheelhouse, and the Wheelhouse pricing suggestions have been shared with iGMS, you will find the rates on the iGMS Multi-calendar and Single Property Calendar.
To make any tweaks to your rates and current pricing strategy, you need to go to your Wheelhouse account. Your rates are managed on the Wheelhouse’s side and synced every 4 hours to iGMS. In case you experience any issues with your pricing synchronization, contact the Wheelhouse support team via their Live Chat.
Earlier in the year, we announced integrations with other dynamic pricing tools – Pricelabs and DPGO. While it is not possible to apply pricing recommendations from all three tools to one property with grouped listings from different platforms at once, you can use these tools concurrently when you manage more than 2 properties.
For instance, let’s say you have 3 properties: A, B, and C. You will be able to manage your pricing for property A, and the listings within it, with PriceLabs, property B with DPGO, and property C with Wheelhouse. You can also switch between the three pricing tools for the same property. The pricing suggestions generated by one of the three tools will start applying for your given property (and listings in the group) as soon as you enable it on iGMS.
If you are wondering how to manage your properties more effectively and increase your revenue, vacation rental automation is the solution for you. Although success doesn’t come overnight and requires your input, it’s much easier to pave the way to it by getting a big chunk of your workload automated. Try iGMS for yourself by signing up for a free 14-day trial.