Welcome to Boostly Podcast Season 11 Episode 17. This is a recap of my Facebook live video where I talked about how Wheelhouse will make you more money,
Here's the audio for this episode:
Here's the video for this episode:
Timestamp
00:00 Start
01:20 Revenge travel
03:40 About Andrew Kitchell of Wheelhouse
06:20 How to get started on Wheelhouse
10:20 Wheelhouse for BnBs and small hotels
13:10 Calendar view in Wheelhouse
14:30 Wheelhouse Automation
16:00 Minimum Price
18:10 When will it be available for my channel manager and my PMS?
21:00 What to do after registering?
23:20 How dynamic is a normal market?
25:50 Length of stay
29:30 The occupancy chart
30:10 How to leverage your price better
32:15 Wheelhouse data
33:50 How does the data automatically update the pricing
41:00 Sneak peek of what's coming to Wheelhouse
56:00 Why Wheelhouse
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Audio – Boostly Podcast
Transcript from the Episode
I am a massive, massive believer that there is going to be one thing happening this year. And that's revenge travel. So what I want everybody to do is promote your business or leave a comment with the name, your name, your business name, where you're located and a link to your website because you never know who could be watching. But Welcome to another edition. Today on this very special podcast edition is that I am going to be interviewing, chatting and showing you all about a new pricing tool that is gonna make you more revenue per booking. So let's get into the interview.
About Andrew Kitchell of Wheelhouse
Wheelhouse has historically been a dynamic pricing engine for the short term rental space, and dynamic pricing. We're going to talk a little bit about today. But it's basically how do you interpret market information and information about your unique listing to set the right price and maximize your revenue? Right. So that's dynamic pricing.
However, what Wheelhouse launches tomorrow looks like more of a full suite revenue management platform. That means we brought market intelligence reports, we're launching concepts have gone into beta, we have a new booking score analysis tool. So we brought in the range of tools that can help people understand that unique property and earn a lot more. My goal in 2021 the way we thought about it is I actually think if people use the same strategies they use in 2020 and 2019 to price their inventory, that more revenue will be left on the table in 2021 than was last in 2020. So my goal is to help people price well. They said you know it's time to look at your market with fresh eyes to embrace some technology that can hopefully help and to work together to earn more revenue.
How to get started on Wheelhouse
There are two things we're gonna learn today. Right, the first thing we're going to learn is how to use a free market report from Wheelhouse to earn more money in 2021. So no matter what, even if you don't pay Wheelhouse for revenue management services or dynamic pricing services, we'll show you how to create an account today, you can learn more about your market and earn more revenue. Okay, that's part one. And the second thing we are going to do is teach you how to get started on Wheelhouse. So should you like what you learn on that mercury report? And should you want to do dynamic pricing, we're going to teach you that we're gonna make it really simple as well, because who cares what we, you know, we can teach you some things. But if we can teach you and empower you through the tool, we'll call it a good day.
This is just really basic, this is your homepage. If you are getting started for the first time, you can click obviously get started for free, will ask you for your name and email and to create a password, that's great. I'm actually going to log into my account. And the only reason I'm going to log in is what you will end up at the same place. So should you have just created a new account, or should you have signed into your existing account, you will always land on your dashboard.
Okay, and from your dashboard, when you first show up, you'll actually just have one single demo account, you can play around with it and see what you can do on Wheelhouse. But the first thing for most of you, what you are going to do is you're going to add listings, or accounts. So as soon as we know where your listings are, we can show you a market report. And we can obviously start looking we can start looking at price recommendations for you. So there's a bunch of ways I can do that. I can click here. And I can see all the channels that are available to me. We'll talk about that in a second. If you scroll to the bottom, you'd see all these different accounts available for you as well. And if you go to your new user settings, you can add a channel from here. So there are a bunch of different ways.
But let's just click Add listings. Now, something that Mark has pointed out what we were talking about the other day was we'll have days connected to about nine different software services. That's not enough, right. So wait about four to six weeks, we're announcing something which we call Wheelhouse everywhere. And the sneak peek of that is we're going to go from having nine to about 90 software's connected to us. So if you can't use today, don't worry, help is coming. But we're going to talk about kind of the power that's just about to be unlocked for people no matter what channel they're on. Right.
So if I wanted to connect an account, I could click on Airbnb for an example. I can add my email and my password I can connect to Airbnb in that fashion. I can connect. We have a lot of folks on Guesty, you'll just have to ask them for an API key. We work very, very closely with their team super easy to use. Hostfully for example, the guide book company that Mark mentioned, easy to connect your Hostfully account as well. So we work with a lot of great services here on. And there's a kind of a fun sneaky way that we'll be bringing a whole lot more services to market very, very soon. Right. So, once you connect, if you connect to your account, all your listings will be will actually automatically drop you back on your dashboard. And you'll now see all your listings here. And we can start kind of our next level of exploration.
Wheelhouse for BnBs and small hotels
We have people with 1000 plus listings, and we have people with a single listing, right, so the pro tool that we're launching tomorrow is really, it's built upon Wheelhouse's current dynamic pricing engine, but it's faster, it's more responsive, it's easier to use for people with large portfolios. So I'd actually say if you have a large portfolio in this space or a single property, Wheelhouse is going to be pretty easy to use for you. I'm going to show a couple of sneak peeks here. So whereas we're going to actually be able to go in and make adjustments on an individual listing, I recommend we start there first, everything we do today, so let's actually go toggle over to the settings for a second. If I wanted to go adjust things like min stays, I can do so on any number of properties at the same time. So for people looking at last minute discount, any long term discount seasonality, we can adjustments, etc. Again, we're going to step to all of that, my recommendation actually would be that we start by looking at a single listing first thing, let's get one single listing set up first. And literally everything we do on a single listing, we're gonna be able to do on that multi-listing view as well.
So let's say again, we just connected a bunch of listings, and we wanted to go see what one of our listings one of our rooms look like, on Wheelhouse? Well, the first thing we would do, you can click on your calendar from your dashboard. Right, and here's what you're gonna see. On the left side, here, we're gonna see what is our dynamic pricing over the course of the year, we're gonna see a basic calendar view, and we're gonna see things, we're gonna see kind of a calendar with daily prices. And when we click on a day, we're gonna be able to see why is Wheelhouse making a particular price recommendation on a particular day. Now, we can even scroll down, we'll actually see events. So anytime there's a flag, we're gonna see events on our calendar on its kind of a nice, easy way to see what's happening in my market. And we have every single market we're in we actually have event data for as well. And Wheelhouse now is available in 80 countries on six continents, we're in 800 Plus markets, 10,000 plus cities, we're available in quite a few places, but you'll be able to see this information everywhere.
Calendar view in Wheelhouse
Now your calendar view is really a place to get kind of first acquainted with Wheelhouse. And let's say that we were clicking around, we were learning about prices on particular days, and we want to make some adjustments to our pricing strategy in Wheelhouse. Well, there's a lot of ways to do that. Right. So in the first case, let's say you had automated pricing with Wheelhouse, we'll step into it in just one second. But if you wanted to control your calendar, you can always come into Wheelhouse and adjust prices on a particular day. So let's say I wanted to come in and I wanted Wheelhouse to automate the pricing, but I wanted Wheelhouse to increase these particular prices by 20%. Well, you can easily do it. It shows a lot of fine-grained calendar control. And you can also always on Wheelhouse and let's stretch this into a weekend. You can always add a lock-in particular rates, should you not want to take advantage of dynamic pricing, but just lock in particular rates. Right. So that's a quick view of the calendar. We're actually going to come back to the calendar because let's look first at all your settings.
Wheelhouse Automation
This is just the automation tab. This is where you can come to turn on and off automation. It's really simple. But automation is only important once you get your pricing correct. Right. So let's first start with your base price. This is the most important thing to get set up correctly for your calendar. Okay, and when you're setting your base price, your base price is basically what is the price for your listing on a night with the normal demand. In wheelhouse we make it pretty easy, you can take the kind of our basic, easy set and forget it settings, you can do a more conservative approach, meaning your pricing will be a little bit lower, you're more likely to drive occupancy, you can take a more aggressive approach, which means they're taking a little bit of a chance with driving higher average daily rates to maximize revenue as well, or our recommended approach, which in most cases will end up maximizing revenue, right, when you do go to more aggressive, you're taking a little bit more risk, that means your outcome can actually be better. But it could also be worse, right? So you have these easy kind of set it forget it settings, or you can fully customize your base price. So if you came in here and said, Well, my base price, you know needs to be a little bit different, a little bit lower a little bit higher, you'll see that our pricing is adjusting above your base price. Okay, it's kind of step one, we can dive more into how to set the right base price, we have a lot of writing on this as well. But we'll just for now, say that's kind of good enough for now. So we're actually going to click, we're going to leave the setting for a second.
Minimum Price
Another really important thing for folks to get right is your minimum price. So your minimum price is the price that Wheelhouse pricing will never go below, right no matter what, even if it's a low period of demand, a minimum price might be a setting that you want to set on your place. Just to you know, maybe you only want to book to people who can pay you a certain amount per night, it's actually a pretty common thing in our space. So minimum price is a little bit more of an advanced setting, right, and we might come in here and you can see that we've actually set up this property. So we set a global min price, let's just adjust it now to $200 a night. However, we're going to come in and we're going to adjust our weekend pricing setting for a second. So we're going to set up our weekend pricing to be $300 per night, right and you can see is pretty quick and responsive. As soon as you type in a different number here, the graph is instantly going to adjust, if you may be made will make Saturday, Friday, Saturday nights 350. Sorry, here we go. And you can see those quick adjustments to your calendar minimum price.
Now, another fun thing you can do, let's say that you wanted to keep your minimum price high in the far future, but 30 days out, you want to drop your min price to 150. And 20 days out, you want to drop 125 Of course, he said he's gonna be whatever you want. But I hope you're noticing is that whatever strategy you want to employ here is really quickly translated into a view that you can see. And for those folks who asked, it's about managing kind of a whole slew of properties, a bed and breakfast, a hotel, etc. Again, you can do this on all of your listings or a sub-segment, your one bedrooms, two bedrooms, any room type. At the same time, we're going to see that as well. This is just kind of a zoomed-in view first, so we can make sure to learn all the tools.
Similarly, let's say we wanted to add a date-specific minimum price. So maybe there's a few nights on your calendar that you want to make sure you protect. Maybe you know, for September, you want to make sure that right now you're keeping your minimum price at $500 a night, let's just click this sorry. Here we go. You can see that it's out at $500 a night right now. So pretty easy, responsive controls hopefully for your minimum price settings.
When will it be available for my channel manager and my PMS?
We actually have the technology to add 35 new PMS today. However, there's one more thing we're working on that will not unlock one PMS but one lock is 60 additional PMS. So we are on. We are a little bit excited about both on the integration side announcing that in one big fell swoop in about four to six weeks. That's part one. There's also a data partnership. We're working on Wheelhouse right now even though I'm happy we're available in 60-70 countries, etc. That's not enough. And there's also a lot of markets that want us especially remote markets. So we're working on a data partnership that will make us available now as well when we are not live in your market it's because we're not willing to make bad recommendations for you. And the amount of data we need to make very good recommendations for you is non-trivial, right. So if today you were a property owner with more than 50 listings and you're in a market, it'll take us four weeks to get your market set up. However, again, we're working on our own data partnerships that will make Wheelhouse essentially available everywhere. We're not very far away, we'll be able to help you out very soon. I can't wait. I apologize. We're not available in your market today.
What to do after registering?
I think maybe the really important thing to learn because there are resources that are available to you to do better revenue management today, even without Wheelhouse, right, so we have a whole bunch. If you go to our website, to our homepage, you will see a whole bunch of courses. If you scroll down the page here, you're actually going to see, on our homepage, we have these revenue management courses available now. And all of these so demand detective, we're actually going to teach you how to read your local demand signals. What it'll give you in your audience today, I'll give you a link to a bunch of videos that actually, whereas these, if you clicked on them, they're going to load a webinar, where you're gonna have to give us your email, I'll just share a link with you. You can put in the YouTube comments as well. But it will basically teach you how can you learn your markets, three key demand signals, which are seasonality, day of week, and local events. Those are the three demand curves in every single market that you need to look at. Yeah, that's part one. Right?
There are other more advanced revenue management things. So when we're talking about rapid responder pacing Pro, there are ways to do a lot of these things, even outside of Wheelhouse, that we will make sure people have their hands on this year because guess what, it's our job this year to make sure the industry succeeds. Wheelhouse's long term success is partly dependent on a strong bounce back from those whose businesses were impacted this year. So we will make those resources available. We've done a bunch of talks on that one really fun thing for seasonality. If you don't, if you're the same price every single night of the year, you're roughly leaving 20% of revenue on the table.
How dynamic is a normal market?
Let's just go see how dynamic a normal market is. We're gonna look at San Francisco, but it's going to be true of every single market, we'll just see how dynamic demand is. And as soon as you see that, you'll be like okay, so of course I need to be adjusting prices. There's a bunch of things you can do tips and tricks do everything that I'm going to show you how to, report is available in other kinds of differentiated fashions as well. So here's why we need to look at data to inform our pricing. So I'm on a Wheelhouse market report. This is free for any market we're live in. Now. This is free and available to you. So for those folks who have created an account, linked properties and if we're live in your market, you can click on your market Intel tab now and go step through this.
The first thing I'm going to urge you to look at, we have two types of charts, we have time series, and distribution I'm going to show you there's kind of a beginner and advanced aspect of these lead time. If I click on lead time, I will see how lead time changes every single day in my market. And what lead time means is how far in the future are people booking in my market? Right? When the reason this chart is so spiky and differentiated almost to a point of not being valuable, is it shows us that all these big demand spikes are these high peaks here. These are times and people are looking very far in the future. right but you can see lead time change Every single day for every single market and changes by inventory type, it changes by neighbourhood. Already, we're starting to see why dynamic pricing data and foreign pricing can help us kind of discern what demand actually is in a market and figure it out.
Now, another way to look at lead time for your markets, is to go look at now we clicked over to the distribution curve. This is lead time again. And now what I'm seeing here is I'm seeing the percentage of bookings that were made in my market, a certain number of days from a state, right, so what I am hovering over this thing here, and I'm looking at, I'm looking at San Francisco in January. And I'm looking at all performers, I could filter by a lot, I'm looking at all bedroom types, I could filter by those, I'm looking at all different people asked about b&b Hotel, etc. You can filter by that data as well. But what we can see is when we're looking at all bookings within a market in January, 21% of all bookings occurred in the last five days.
Okay, now let's look at what December, What did last year look like? Well, it actually looked pretty different, right? So you can see, you can see, as we're looking at kind of lead time charts and markets, this is December 2020. This is December 2019. Now, I guarantee you, whatever market you're in whether your market has been devastated, and there are no bookings, because you've been shut down due to COVID. Or whether you're booming because you're a drive-to destination, or you happen to be performing well, I guarantee you the thing that is changing your market is lead time and length of stay. If you're in a drive to destination where bookings are actually happening, there's so much demand and a lot of markets, that people are starting to book even farther out into the future, right? I highly recommend people go look at their lead time chart and start to figure out when are people booking in my market?
Length of stay
The second thing you mentioned, length of stay, right? So length of stay has changed in almost every market as well. And you need to know how long are people booking in your market and a lot of markets now. We're seeing people book. Let's go look at your market in Scarborough, right? Let's look at Scarborough. Let's go look at the average length of stay in Scarborough right now. So this is in January, and we're starting to see that about 20% of bookings in Scarborough are now 14 days or more. Now, the only way you can get a booking that's 14 days or more is if you have are available for 14 days or more on your calendar, right? When people come in look for these long term stays, which might be very valuable for you to book. Well, you need to protect your calendar, make sure you don't get that booking. So lead time and length of stay this data can be instantly translated into a particular thing. So let's just say for Scarborough, we have now learned that 20% of bookings are 14 days or more. And we know that from a lead time perspective, let's go see when are people booking in Scarborough? Well, right now, it looks like the average booking in Scarborough is happening about 17 days from the stay day. Right? So about 50% of all bookings are happening 17 days before stay day.
The occupancy chart
This is occupancy looking forward a year. And what you're able to see and this is we have this for all markets as well. I've toggled over to the future tab on your market reports. I'm looking at occupancy. And not only will you be able to see we're starting to see booking patterns emerge for in the future right so even though very few bookings have occurred. This is Chicago USA, you were able to come to look at expected occupancy in your market even based on the very little signal.
How to leverage your price better
Now the other thing I always encourage people to look at, this is really wild in the short term rental space. A very non-obvious thing that you can leverage to price your property better is that as a stay day approaches in a lot of markets, available inventory increases. That means, if this is tomorrow, you can see and we're looking at Chicago right now, but we could look at almost any market here, you can see there are 6500 rooms available. And if we go a little farther in the future, there are actually fewer rooms available. That's very unique. Right, this doesn't happen in the airline space, it doesn't happen in the hotel space. But in the short term rental space, your competitive set often increases as the stay day approaches because people block their calendars, especially now 3, 6, 9 months out, which means if you are selling your inventory, three months out three to six months out six to nine months out, you are selling against a much smaller competitive set. It's really important to get that right. You can price differently against that competitive set, basically.
So this is all the information at your fingertips now, right, we can look into the future, we can see how many rooms are available, we can look at how Wheelhouse is translating very small booking signals into detailed information about how my market is going to book and of course, I can filter again by high performers, or inventory type, etc. To see the same thing. I can look at what my competitors and others are asking for. Right? So if I went over and said, What are people asking for in my market, I can now see what people are charging on a nightly basis. So all of this information shows you especially once COVID is starting to become a little more under control. Once travel patterns are starting to emerge, every market is going to look different. Yeah, it's gonna look different than you knew in 2020, it's going to look different than you knew in 2019. So the best way to empower yourself is to take advantage and look at the real data. It's relatively easy to apply to your portfolio.
Wheelhouse data
We get it from connected channel partners, we get it from hotel data as well. So if your market has hotels that are relevant to you, we have multiple hotel data partnerships. Part of the reason Wheelhouse is going to be available everywhere is we're working on two additional data partnerships that will enable us to price people accurately far and wide. Wheelhouse has analyzed about 3 million listings per night, we've done so for six-plus years. And we've also had, we have about 50,000 linked listings, which means we see perfect data for all of those properties every single day.
How does the data automatically update the pricing
Wheelhouse's job is to make data very accessible to you and make sure we're surfacing good, valuable data to you, and putting you in control of it. And then automating it so you can kind of run your business to the best of your abilities. Let's go click in again to our settings. And here on the one thing that I was going to recommend is once you understand what data is available to you, you still might want to set some parameters around kind of like, you might Want to tell wheelhouse your strategy? So we told Wheelhouse some potential strategy around min pricing, right? We already updated that. However, you might want to come in. And here are some other ways you can kind of get your hands on the machine. So well, one caveat. First of all, automation is simple, you can turn on or off wheelhouse pricing with a single click every single day. And Wheelhouse will literally analyze your market your competitive set everything every single night, and update your pricing. And it's one click away. Right? So, however, you might want to come in and say, Hey, you know what, I want to take a slightly different strategy, whether it's more conservative, or more aggressive than wheelhouse or a fully customized strategy, right. So once you see what wheelhouse is, or kind of how your markets perform on weekends, you can come in and look at a market, you could, again, set the knobs and dials of your machine to say I want to do more conservative recommended more aggressive or let's just say even though wheelhouse is already going to be adjusting automatically around your weekend demand. You said, Hey, I want to take more risk on weekends, I want to bump my weekend demand or my weekend prices by an average of 20%. Well, you just did it right. It was that simple. We came in here we customize.
So here you can see that wheelhouse is already adjusting automatically. And on a monthly basis around seasonal seasonal demand. Well, let's say again, that you thought Wheelhouse is good 11 months of the year. But for August, and September, you wanted to come in and really crank rates for a little while, especially in the far future, right? You might say, Hey, we're gonna raise our prices during high seasons. Because we believe this pandemic pricing is or kind of this kind of revenge travel as Mark is speaking to, that is really going to drive rates to levels that we haven't seen before. And guess what? I believe that too. I don't think that's crazy. I think it's 100% accurate. And I think we're already seeing it in markets in Australia and other places that are starting to get closer to the unlock, right.
So if you wanted to just adjust and take control of your pricing engine in any way, again, it's really easy to come in and do it. Right.
There are other pricing tools out there. And when we took a look at what when we were thinking about kind of professionalizing wheelhouse and really doubling down on the investment, the team has gone from four to 15 people in the last 12 months. One of the things that we really thought we needed to do in 2021, was to make data transparent and accessible in a way that it just hasn't been before. Right. So tomorrow's launch of our pro platform is step one of a whole bunch of things. I'm happy to show people kind of behind the scenes of the things that we will make transparent this year. And that we've been showing to people saying, Hey, here's all the data that we can use to empower your business. But I actually agree, I think the category hasn't been good historically about sharing data about making data exportable about making data, like how do you drive kind of accountability around revenue management, guess what revenue management is really, really hard. There are times when you first think about your property that we need to see a few bookings before it will be perfect. That's just the truth. That's the way it works. So our goal in 2021, is to make data transparent and accessible, I'm happy to show you a little sneak peek of what that looks like.
Sneak peek of what's coming to Wheelhouse
First of all, you might have noticed, that there are a few green boxes on the page, and one of them says beta only. Okay, well, what this actually is for all properties, and this is actually I'm gonna leave this page to, we are about a, this actually is in beta, that means 50 customers are using this tool today. But we have a comp set tool that is in beta, where you're actually able to come in and see, you can build a comprehensive up to 100 listings. And you have one last concept, but then you can create three more concepts. You can see we say coming soon here, I'm actually going to click into a user here. And because this is in beta, we might run into a little snafu here. But we're gonna, we're gonna roll the dice because we'd like to do things live. Okay, so in this case, we're going to go, this will just speak a little bit of the data transparency up, if we run into an issue, we're going to give it one go. Okay, so I'll have to share out a video on the content coming live. But basically, what you can see here is an ability to look at a map, look at all the data from properties near you, and actually look at their price on a daily basis, and even export that data and do it however you want. So these comp sets are about two to three weeks away from going live to everyone. This is part of the big infrastructure rebuild we've been taking on and so pretty excited to share that with you.
But what I actually wanted to show you is a little bit behind the scenes. And the first thing here is notice that we're we hopefully have what you think is a slightly nice looking website. But we're about to step into what we call the experiments section of wheelhouse. And these are all the data science tools we built over the last five and a half years to AB test every aspect of our modeling, I'm going to click into one of these tools right now. Okay, so what we're stepping into is a little bit of behind the scenes of wheelhouse, it's not beautiful, it is data-rich, okay, and this is a customer who just moved over to wheelhouse, they're based in Australia, this is one of their 400 properties. And as we step through some of the data on the back end, again, this is how an automated pricing tool can be put to work for you.
The reason I'm showing this now it's a sneak peek is because while this is in the back end, and our data science section now, this is also another part of our it's actually part of our next product sprint, which means is most eight weeks away from being in your fingertips, we're going to make a little bit more beautiful, but let's see what's here. Okay, so first of all, you'll see that when we're analyzing a base price, there is a huge amount of data we're looking at. So this is actually a this is a summary of a summary of the data that we look at to analyze each unique property and to be able to suggest a base price to you. And to do that we look at yes your bedrooms and bathrooms and the number of photos you have and where you're located. We can click on a map to see where you are. We look at your fee structure. And we come up with an initial base price. Right? And then we look at every single booking you've ever had. And we readjust that base price because guess what, over time, every booking you get tells us more about your property. If you're the first to book in your market, we obviously know you're underpriced. If you consistently book at the very end the last few places ago that can be great, it also can be a little bit lucky. So every single booking and this is the beauty of pricing for the short term rental space, Yes, our challenge is that every single home is unique, every single property is unique. However, we can look at the data to understand how each property is unique over time. And this first data chart here shows us how deep the information is just around your base price, right, we're seeing every attribute, we're looking at every single booking. And in this case, if the revenue manager, this team as a full-time revenue manager had made any adjustments, we would see that here as well. Okay.
Now, once we have your base price, we actually come in and we build multiple local demand models, right? So for every single property in our system, we have what's called a predictive demand model. And our predictive model looks at what is price signal in your market? How are other hotels properties near you priced? We need to look at that because pricing is really is an assumption on what we think is going to happen in our market. Right? That's the same as the true prices on the stock exchange that signals what the market thinks is going to be true about a business in the future. Well pricing, hotels, airlines short term rentals, the market is telling us what people think is going to happen in the market. And that is one local demand model we look at.
Now the second local demand model we look at is the reactive model, right? The reactive model says, well, who cares what we thought 12 months ago, All that matters is what bookings actually happened in a market in a neighbourhood on an inventory type. Right? Guess what I thought July 2020, was going to be a pretty good month across most American markets. And we were wrong. COVID hit? Right. So we'd only use a predictive model to look at pricing signal. It hadn't made a very robust reactive model, we would have been so well, our recommendations would have been no good. However, our reactive model is strong enough that we've had Marriott and other hotel groups come to us and say, can you tell us more about what you're doing here? What's going on? This is where hotels can learn from short term rentals, because our pricing challenges are harder.
Okay, and again, all of our showing you now, we are going to make this all in your hands. Now, we blend those models on a daily basis. And when I spoke to Australia going wild, because people are starting to book, The reason it doesn't look like there's a big difference between the predictive and reactive model is if this is the Melbourne market in Australia, and you can see that around the holidays, at the end of the year, there's such a big spike in prices that people are charging in the market that they're both charging and that people are looking at that it's messed up the y axis, right? So we can't see that the predictive and the reactive model here are actually about 40% apart. But that's 40% higher recommendation around what's actually happening in the market, on these days that you'd see if you're just pricing off your competitors prices, right. This is how we can translate bookings signal into information for you. Right.
The blended model is what we post every single night, right, we have to lean a little bit on the predictive and a little bit on the reactive model. And this next chart shows us exactly how we do that. Right. So now we are looking at model blending. And I recognize this is a little bit of the science behind revenue management. It's really effin fun. But you can see here that in the far future, it's a little small, but you can see that the reactive model more than a year out or about a year out, it doesn't have a big impact on our model yet, right. There's just not enough bookings for us to be saying okay, well, we can translate one or two or five bookings into exactly how we should price your home. However, as the stay day approaches, so when we're looking at the next few days here, you'll see that the reactive model, which is again tied to actual bookings, on your inventory type, competitive set market, etc. The reactive model makes up most of our recommendation, and it changes over time, right. So we go from kind of predicting prices to responding to actual booking patterns over time and we don't do it in a boring linear fashion or even kind of a subtly quadratic fashion. When bookings pick up in your neighbourhood or in your market or your inventory type, the reactive model kicks in faster. This is basically the machine that 24 hours a day is watching out for your inventory type.
When you automate with wheelhouse, this is what you're tapping into. Now, we can go break out all these individual models and we can show you you know, just local events, you know, I can show you just local events and weekends there, I can show you just seasonality, I can show your temporality curve, I can show that for the predictive model, the reactive model, the blended model. I can also and this will be part of our offering, with one click, copy, and export all of this data. Data empowerment is coming to you. And it's coming to you by the end of q1.
Lastly, model date. Now, if I wanted to go look back at in time and say, Well, what did we last recommend? I don't care what they recommended today. What do they tell me to do on October 10, or November 11? Or at the start of January? Well, that accountability is coming into revenue management as well. So from the education, from the pricing plans that we're bringing to market that empower people to kind of take like, we're literally bringing a pricing plan to market we'll talk about in a second that enables you to keep more money, you can not only earn more revenue in 2020, we increase revenue by 22.6%. And yes, we're going to tell you how we measure that, because that's actually really difficult to do, too. We can spend a little bit of time on that. And know we're a little tight on time. But um, the only other thing I wanted to highlight is, yeah, all of this, we're gonna empower people we're gonna make, we're going to do so in a way that hopefully is affordable and compassionate.
Free and paid plans
So this is our pricing plan for 2021, it scales by portfolio, both of these plans, scale by portfolio size, but we decided and this is live tomorrow. Obviously, you can sign up today, and you'll get the same thing. And we basically said there's too much unpredictability in markets and portfolios out there right now to have one, one way of pricing, right, we have customers and markets that might still shut down and they might have no demand, in which case, they're not going to make money. So us charging a flat fee would be detrimental to their business. And there are markets that are booming right now, where if they were paying a commission model of 1%, they'd be paying wheelhouse keenly a lot of money. And I do think we're worth it, right. Like the way to think about revenue management. The reason you pay for revenue management is it makes you more money. So if you have a better pricing engine, you make more money, and you actually cost you less, but anyway, we just decided to put people in control. Meaning you can link your portfolio and you can either have if you're making a lot of money, pay us the flat fee, you will literally you will keep more money, right so you do not only earn more money, but keep more. if your market is kind of unpredictable, I'd recommend the commission model, right the commission model will only pay you after your month is your only pay us after your month is complete, it'll be totally tied to how much money we make you and how much money you earn. So it's kind of whatever you want whatever is best for you wouldn't ever enables you to keep more money is fine by us in 2021. And we might continue to do this indefinitely, who knows we're just we thought it was a slightly more compassionate pricing plan. If you're in multiple markets and one market is strong and one is weak, you can split your portfolio in any way you like. But we're kind of inviting you to game us however you keep more money, do it.
Why Wheelhouse
We tried to cover a lot today, we kind of obviously explored some interesting avenues. But I would say the early question that great to have all this data, how can I put it to use what I what I can really assure you is, especially if you spent an hour or two watching some of our educational courses, if you tried for literally 30 minutes to set up your own account and adjust the knobs and dials, revenue management can very quickly go from overwhelming to extremely empowering, extremely empowering. And the first time you get a booking for more than you thought will show you that you're you're pretty good at this right you do know your market, especially with better tools you can do better. And I always say to people look, as soon as you list your property online, you are a revenue manager. And it says easy now to have an advanced revenue management strategy that captures you more money as to just leave it be.
So I'd highly recommend people, especially in this year, use data to inform your revenue management strategy. It's not as hard as it looks, and will very quickly go from on you know, from a lot of noise to a signal. So that's part one. Now why wheelhouse versus other pricing tools. I think the three things I always say here. The first is the depth of the data. And Wheelhouse has invested a huge amount in our data science. And I know it's easy to say oh, we made X amount more money. It's pretty intangible for folks. But the depth of data that we have is, is really unprecedented. And then we've turned that data into we've just AB tested it so much I don't think anyone in the space can really come close on the depth of data that we have around this product. Right? We've managed run AB tests, we know everything from how does a pet fee to a cancellation fee to two on, you know, photo order impact your expected revenue. So the depth of the data is part one.
Part two is for folks who have larger portfolios, hopefully, we got kind of a taste of the interface today that makes it really easy and fast to manage and control your whole portfolio. So the usability of the site is something we're often kind of, we hear is it's something I guess people think is for whatever, whatever the right term is there. But it's the design and usability and the third thing is customer support. Alright, so we have 24/7 customer support. We take care of people, if they have a single property or 1000 properties, right, we're gonna treat you the same, you have access to the educational content. So if we're not there to help for any reason that you need us immediately, but we do a 24/7 chat. Um, you can go and learn more on your own right. So it's a little bit of it's the depth of the data is the ease of use, and it's the customer support that kind of holistically add up to a revenue management tool, which really makes people more revenue. And, you know, that's kind of amazing.
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