Posted on
May 24, 2021
by
Jun Xiao
Your monthly e-newsletter for CANMORE SHORT TERM RENTAL MARKET to invest and track your performance.
Click HERE to see the FULL PDF report.
Canmore is considered as Drive-to destination, which means Lots of weekend leisure travel but very little demand during the week.
Pricing Strategy is critical for Short Term Rental business.
First, you need to learn your market's rate trend, establish your reviews in the market, and IDENTIFY the PEAK, SHOULDER, LOW periods.
2nd, build a matrix according to your experiances by PERIODS, and LEAD TIME, For Example, May's long weekend, 26% of rooms were booked within a week, 33% were booked in last 8-30 days, 23% were booked in 31-60 days, and 18% were booked before 2 months. Higher percentages of the bookings happend within a month, so your April pricing strategy should be more aggressive within the leadtime period. Whereas during the PEAK periods, more people book their visits 3 months or even 1 year ahead, Then you should consider to market those dates in much earlier time. In Short, if you are able to divide the calandar year into as many periods as possible, and know each periods' lead time, you will be ready to sell your units at the time and price when people are searching.
Then, as time approaches the BOOKING LEAD TIME, if your occupancy is lower than the market average, you need to adjust your pricing gradually and quickly. Missing the prime time to adjust your price is costly.
There are many other strategies to be considered as well, early-bird, Occupancy based adjustment, Loyal clients promotion pricing, etc. You need to review all the strategies as a whole and balance the cancellation policies to make sure it's logical to the guests. For example, someone booked your unit for the Xmas for a week 6 months advance, and they made the last minute cancellation, then you might risk of losing the highest potential revenues.
Lastly, many dynamic pricing softwares are available for you to work with. No matter which one that you use, make sure you understand its logics behind it, and customize the tool to maximize your potential revenues.
