Price Hack for Airbnb Hosts

Airbnb hosting is the perfect hybrid of entrepreneur and passive investment. You control most aspects of your product, but can still rely on the safety net of a large company.

You can control the quality, and more importantly — the price. This gives you the freedom to study the rules of supply and demand in your specific area, and apply various pricing strategies depending on your situation and end goal.

Are you looking to put in less work and only host occasionally? Charge a higher nightly fee. Enjoy the stability of knowing exactly how much you will make next month? Set a lower rate and watch your calendar book up.

Those of us using Airbnb to reach financial independence need to find the sweet spot between those two — you want to minimize vacancies, without undervaluing your home and leaving money on the table. It’s a fine art, and may take a few months to perfect.

Lucky for you, I am going to teach you a little-known pricing hack utilized by the highest earning hosts.

By manually pricing your calendars on a weekly basis, guests will see a lower rate than what they can actually book.

We will get into the specifics in a minute, but essentially it works like this: guests searching for Airbnbs in your area (before inputting the exact dates of their travel) will see all of listings in your city advertised at their base price. The advertised price can be lower than the actual rate per night. Guests can use a price filter in this initial search, which shows them all of the Airbnbs in town with a base price in their desired range (under $100, for example). Once the guest selects an Airbnb, they will input their travel dates and receive the actual nightly rate (which may be higher or lower than the original $100/night quote).

*disclaimer: Some hosts are not comfortable using this technique because they feel it is “misleading”. I disagree. I keep my base price lower, but still realistic, and last minute vacancies are often booked at that rate, or even lower. The base is just that — the very bottom. I consider this an advertising technique to expose your listing to more audiences.

So, how can you tap into this powerful pricing hack? It can be done in 5 easy steps.

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