Airbnb rolls out a pricing recommendation tool for hosts
If you try to book a hotel room in San Diego in September, you can probably get one for around $200-300 a night. If you try to do the same in mid-July during Comic-Con? You'll likely have to cough up close to $1,000 a night, and that's if you can get a room at all. If you're an Airbnb host, it'd behoove you to know about these sorts of surges in demand, so you can price your room appropriately. Today, Airbnb has rolled out a tool called Price Tips that lets you do just that. It utilizes Airbnb's own machine learning tool called Aerosolve that'll suggest room pricing based on the demand for rooms, its location, travel trends, the listing type and so forth.
In an example shown at the company's own developer conference in San Francisco (seen in the GIF above), if your pricing is too high, the calendar dates will be red, prompting you to drop your listing price so that your place is more likely to get booked. According to Mike Curtis, Airbnb's VP of engineering, pricing is one of the biggest issues for hosts to get right. But they've found that if it's priced within five percent of the suggested price, it's about four times likely to get booked. And if you want to gift someone an Airbnb stay? Well, good news: Airbnb has also unveiled the ability to give and redeem gift cards starting today.
