Pricelabs – How To Create Your Comparison Sets

Intro

[00:00:00] Liam: Okay, everybody. So we are living in a time in which data drives. Everything is king. You need to know what is going on in your industry, in your market. And today we are diving in with a special guest. Who's going to show us how we can get the very best out of the data? That's available to us and we can go look for this data.

[00:00:19] If this is your first time here, you're listening to the Boostly podcast. Uh, this is a podcast that gives hosts, the tools, the tactics, the training, and the confidence to go out there and get more direct bookings. My name is Liam Carolan and my special guest today. We've got Fausto. He's the head of strategic partnerships at Price Labs.

[00:00:38] Now. Some of you will be listening to this going, yeah, I've heard of price labs. Yeah, I know what it does. Well, even if you've heard of price labs, they're constantly, constantly looking at, um, new features and, uh, data all the time. It's worth just going back, looking at your settings, listening to the experts, listening to people who, who, uh, are from price labs and how you can perfect your, your comps and your data sets.

[00:01:02] And that's what we're going to be doing today. If you've not heard of price labs, please do. Type price labs into a Google search. They're an amazing company and they help you with dynamic pricing. So before I cover too much of that, let's dive in. Let's say hi to Fausto and welcome him along. So welcome along.

A bit more about Fausto?

[00:01:18] Fausto: Hi, Liam. Thank you for having me. Uh, thank you for the invitation. So, uh, I was introduced already, but, uh, we'll introduce a little bit more. So my, my name is Fausto I'm with, uh, with Pricelabs for three and a half years now. Uh, so I started, uh, we were a small team. Now we are a very big team. Uh, at the moment, uh, I've done some other things in Pricelabs, but at the moment I'm, uh, I'm working with the strategic partnerships, uh, mainly focused on Europe and Latin.

[00:01:50] Um, yeah, and, uh, I was a Pricelabs user before, so I was a revenue manager before joining Pricelabs, and I was a Pricelabs user for two or three years before joining, joining the team. Um, so far, for whoever doesn't, for people who don't know what Pricelabs does, we are a revenue management system, uh, basically split it into three different, main tools or features.

[00:02:13] There is dynamic pricing, market data and reports. Uh, the idea is for people to be able to, uh, apply, like see their strategy, look at metrics, look at their KPI, see how the market is doing and apply, uh, those tactics and strategies inside PriceLabs, and don't need to be jumping between systems, et cetera, and have all in one.

[00:02:36] In terms of a revenue management system, nothing else. So basically, and just to explain why, why it's important to be always updated, even if you're using a tool for years, it's always when you're using at least a revenue management system, you should be able to keep updated, look at your It doesn't matter which one you use, you should look at the updates because it's, it's really like revenue management is a complex topic.

[00:03:03] And the biggest difficulty that we have is trying to make the product as easy to use as possible in spite. It has to solve a complex topic, right? So there's also there, there's always a lot of updates, a lot of new features, a lot of features that are, it's the same feature, but the way it works changes.

[00:03:23] So if you are, if you're not keeping updated with your revenue management system, and if it's a good revenue management system, probably you are only getting like 30 40 50 60% of it. I've seen some clients that don't get everything that they can do with the tool that they are using.

[00:03:43] And about this market report like custom data report. We noticed that one of the biggest we created our market dash was that some market data tool so you can use it even if you don't have, um, properties and you are not using dynamic pricing. Just if you want to get some market patterns, you can use it.

[00:04:03] So it's, it's an independent tool of the, of the dynamic pricing tool. Um, but we noticed that a lot of our users, so there's like, It is awesome. We can get data. We can look at market data. We can see how the market is going, but we always struggle to be able to define what the market is for us. So because it depends, right, it depends.

[00:04:26] You have to be able to do the right segmentation to get the best out of it. So this is in terms of revenue management, uh, like traditionally what we call a concept. So we have to define our concept and it's our competitors that we want to track, right? Or even if you are investing in a market and you just want to look at market data, you have to be able to select what.

[00:04:50] Is a market for what you want to track it? So this is one of the main updates that we had in the market dashboards that, um, you can create your custom data report so you can create even one-by-one goal listing by listing in a certain region in a certain area. And the market dashboards can have different sizes so you can get a Market dashboard with 1000 listings, 5000 or 10, 000 or 10, 000.

[00:05:17] It's a very wide area in some in some, uh, country, depending on the city might be more than one city. 10, 000 listing.

Access to what data?

[00:05:25] Liam: What sort of data will hosts and people like myself be able to get access to just give us an overview of what we can see and why. That's going to be important.

[00:05:36] Fausto: Yeah. So the, the, you have access to the main KPIs, like ADR, occupancy, like average daily rate, occupancy, length of stay, uh, the booking window when people are booking in your market.

[00:05:48] Uh, you can see this, uh, by periods, for example, in the last year, in the last 30 days, in the last seven days, but you can also see the average per month. Um, you can look at the occupancy as well. One that I like is the length of stay. So you can see the occupancy and what and the length of stay, what is the weight of each length of stay in that occupancy.

[00:06:10] So for example, is my market very strong in bookings of more than 30 days? Or is my market strong in bookings of two days or one day? To understand it's that total occupancy, what is the percentage of nights that come from bookings of two nights or seven nights, etc? So usually these main KPIs, you can also compare your prices.

[00:06:29] You can even see, like, the most common amenities, the cancellation policy that your competitors are using, the value of extra gas that your competitors are charging, the number of people doing weekly discounts, monthly discounts. So there's a huge amount of information. And why is this? Custom concepts, uh, very useful because you will be able to see at the listing level, uh, and you can open the link and see it in, in, in this case, our market dashboards, uh, for the moment have Airbnb and verbal, we will add booking.

[00:07:03] Com at some point, I don't want to. Tell me which state because I'm I don't want to overpromise, but we are using booking. com data in our dynamic pricing tool. We are planning on adding it to the market dashboard.

To the non-techies

[00:07:19] Liam: I know there's a lot of people who have listened to this and gone. Do you know what?

[00:07:21] I'm just not very techie. I don't understand the figures and the numbers. What would you say to those people? How does price lab help to, um, sort that out? You know, like for the people who just don't know what to do? What kind of features and tools and how, what would you say to them?

[00:07:38] Fausto: So we have several, like several ways of helping.

[00:07:41] Like we have daily webinars, for example, in English, we have webinars in five languages, but, uh, daily it's in English. Then we have weekly in Spanish and French. Italian, Portuguese, uh, as well. Um, we have, uh, uh, our support team that speaks all these languages. I think a couple more, but, uh, at least these five are covered officially.

[00:08:03] Yeah. So you can, and they work 24 hours, uh, seven days a week. So you can, uh, contact our support team. But of course, if you need a call, uh, uh, and depending. Uh, the on the complexity of your account, you might be able to do it with the help of our support team, or you might be assigned an account manager that will help you to set everything up and that will help you like with my weekly calls, for example, the beginning or weekly call at the beginning, then monthly calls, uh, what we call whatever you might be, for example, in my case, in spite time with the in charge of the partnerships.

[00:08:40] I still do some account management with all clients because before I was doing account management, the business development. So I still have like monthly calls or with some clients every quarter because they just wanted every quarter. So, we have, our account managers as well assigned to the clients.

[00:08:56] Uh, but it depends a little bit on the complexity of the account, the size of the account, et cetera. How it is split. If you have one property, probably our support team will help you to set up and do your party. But if you have like 100, you probably will need specific settings that you will do it in with onboarding calls with us.

[00:09:16] But for everyone, our support team is great. I think it's probably one of the strengths of price labs they are very fast and fast and friendly and they can help you to set up everything.

[00:09:27] Liam: Awesome. Thank you so much for today. So as a host, go and check out price labs. Um, if you've listened to this and you're inspired to go and check them out, please do so, but also share this with somebody else who may be able to get some value out of it that might not know about price labs or some of the awesome new reports, custom data reports and things like that, which are coming out.

[00:09:47] Thank you for listening to Boostly. We know there are a lot of places you can put your attention and thank you for putting it with us. That's it for now. And we'll see you on the next one. Having a blast, gonna get

[00:09:57] Fausto: it's on the Boostly

[00:09:58] podcast. Bruce Lee like Bruce Lee cause it's so hard and the tea is loose leaf.

[00:10:02] Making up those rhymes, don't write it, just do it loosely.