Best Revenue Management Software for Vacation Rentals

Running a vacation rental is a lot of work, including communicating with guests, marketing on social media, keeping the property clean, running efficiently, and attractive to guests, and so much more. Managing the revenue of your vacation rental is complicated but a crucial task in ensuring your vacation rental business is thriving, growing occupancy and revenue. Here’s our guide to the best revenue management software for vacation rentals. (Check out our top revenue management best practices for vacation rentals here.)

What is Revenue Management for the Vacation Rental industry?

Revenue management is the use of data analytics and strategy to predict consumer behavior in order to optimize product availability to maximize revenue growth. In the vacation rental industry, revenue management means proactively maximizing your revenue by ensuring your property is listed at the right price at the right time and marketed to the right guest on the right channel. This requires an inordinate amount of flexibility and understanding of data on your part, to strategically change your property pricing depending on where you are marketing it, to whom, and when.

Why is Revenue Management Important for Vacation Rentals?

While the vacation rental industry has picked itself up from the slowdown of the global pandemic and begun growing again, the COVID-19 crisis has nevertheless upended some aspects of the vacation rental landscape, including revenue management. Relying on historical data and its understanding to design your revenue management strategy for the new era will simply not cut it anymore. While seasons remain for the most part, booking windows, lengths of stay, rates, types of property found attractive and even services expected have all changed.

To compete in this new scenario, you need greater insight into how your market is behaving, closely monitor changes and work proactively to continuously adjust for conversion and maximizing of revenue.

Why do you need Software to Manage Revenue for your Vacation Rental?

As revenue management gets increasingly more complicated, requiring more time and effort, even as you must compete harder on other aspects in a crowded vacation rental market, you are at risk of stretching yourself too thin and not doing well at any of your responsibilities. You can always hire an analyst to handle your revenue management needs but this is unlikely to make fiscal sense. And while Airbnb does offer a Smart Pricing Tool that is free to use, its incentive is to offer guests the lowest price. In contrast, revenue management software automates the entire complex process including dynamic pricing, to automatically maximize your profits.

What are the Best Revenue Management Software for Vacation Rentals?

There are five main competitors in the vacation rental revenue management software space. They are easy to use, driven by data, and offer fairly similar features and good customer support. Most offer a trial period during which customers can test out the software for free. Their main differences lie in pricing structures and direct integrations into OTAs like Airbnb, VRBO, and Booking.com. Here are the best revenue management software for vacation rentals.

Beyond

A pioneer in dynamic pricing software, Beyond services over 340,000 listings in over 7,500 cities worldwide. A comprehensive revenue management platform, Beyond offers a dynamic pricing tool, a website builder and direct booking engine, performance metrics, and revenue forecasting. Its team of specialists also provides expert guidance, from reviewing individual listings to hands-on, personalized pricing strategies based on deep knowledge of local markets.Beyond delivers a 12% higher occupancy rate, 21% more reservations, and 2X repeat bookings from the direct booking site, as well as up to 40% increase in revenue.

• Integrates directly with Airbnb, VRBO and Booking.com
• Integrates directly with Hostaway
• Flexible pricing of 1% of revenue
• Free trial up to 30 days

PriceLabs

Offering portfolio analytics, dynamic pricing and market dashboards for locations around the world, PriceLabs recommends daily rates based on factors including market supply and demand, seasonality, day of the week trends, special events and holiday predictions, and the number of days left to book. Rates are updated and built upon the base rate calculated for each listing based on historic and future performance data. PriceLabs offers a suite of customizations including minimum prices, discounts, premiums, and occupancy-based adjustments. It also allows for bulk adjustments and showcases performance indicators.

• Integrates directly with Airbnb and VRBO
• Integrates directly with Hostaway
• Free Portfolio Analytics. All you have to do is sign up.
• Fixed price of $19.99 per listing per month for Dynamic Pricing for properties located in the US, Canada and Europe. Discounted rates as the number of listings increases.
• Fixed price of $9.99 per listing per month for Dynamic Pricing for properties located elsewhere in the world. Discounted rates as the number of listings increases.
• Fixed price of $9.99 per month for Market Dashboards.
• Free trial up to 30 days

Wheelhouse

Wheelhouse is the only revenue management software team with PhD data scientists. The Wheelhouse Pricing Engine analyzes over 10 billion data points each night to ensure over 240 unique rates each year ensuring an average increase of up to 39% in revenue. Incorporating hyperlocal insights into over 540 markets in 6 continents, it offers hotel-level pricing tools for short-term rentals. Wheelhouse provides personalized recommendations and customizable settings including base price, risk tolerance, price range, minimum nights, etc. It also delivers a complete overview of your market, performance data and 18 months of forward-looking pricing.

• Integrates directly with Airbnb and Trip Advisor
• Integrates directly with Hostaway
• Flexible price of 1% of revenue for up to 100 listings
• Fixed price of $19.99 per listing per month for up to 9 listings, &16.99 per listing per month for 10-49 listings, and $13.99 per listing per month for 50-100 listings
• For a portfolio of over 100 listings, Wheelhouse offers an Enterprise package

Rented

Rented offers Art, its automated rate tool, as well as revenue management services from its team of experts. Art helps vacation rental managers create an optimized pricing structure by delivering dynamic pricing recommendations based on sophisticated pricing models. For vacation rental managers who need hands-on support, Rented provides a dedicated revenue manager who will handle all tasks, from setting prices to monitoring performance and making custom adjustments. This results in an average increase in manager revenue of over 30%, an average ROI of 5X on the cost of Rented’s service, and an average of over 60 minutes saved per property each month.

• Integrates directly with Hostaway
• Fixed price of $19 per month per listing for full version of Art

DPGO

An AI-driven dynamic pricing tool for vacation rental owners and managers, DPGO analyzes over 200 market data parameters to deliver average increases of occupancy rates by up to 30%, earnings by up to 50%, and reduction of time spent on price management by 8X. With access to local insights into over 5,000 markets including in the US and Canada, DPGO uses machine learning to analyze billions of data points to react to market changes in real-time. It allows you to expand on its AI recommendations via custom or standard strategies including More Aggressive or More Conservative. Set a price range of your choice and make use of its growth performance tracking features and pricing forecasts up to a year ahead.

• Integrates directly with Airbnb
• Integrates directly with Hostaway
• Flexible pricing of 0.5% per booking via DPGO
• Fixed pricing of $1 per booked night for bookings via DPGO
• Free trial up to 30 days
• Mobile version available

Why Hostaway partners with the Best Revenue Management Software for Vacation Rentals?

In keeping with its mission to partner with property managers in growing their business by providing solutions to achieve their goals, it is no surprise that Hostaway fully integrates with Beyond, PriceLabs, Wheelhouse, Rented, and DPGO as well as being a preferred partner for Airbnb, VRBO, Trip Advisor, and Booking.com. As an all-in-one vacation rental software provider, Hostaway’s purpose-built PMS and channel manager enable property managers to streamline and manage from one place, marketing, sales, accounting, reporting, payment and communications, driving efficiencies and growing revenue. In addition, Hostaway offers a marketplace of over 100 software integrations that help forward-thinking property managers grow their businesses even further.