Why you have to check out today’s podcast: 

• Discover about marketing strategies that drive pricing for optimized revenue  
• Learn about strategies and techniques to pull in data as the basis to optimize pricing for your vacation rentals 
• Learn how Beyond Pricing software product gather in data to come up with favorable pricing 

Ian McHenry is co-founder and board member for Beyond Pricing. He is a former investment banker and a management consultant in the airline and hotel industry. He founded Beyond Pricing, which helps vacation rentals and Airbnbs maximize their revenue through innovative software products and which has raised over $45m in venture capital from top-tier investors including Bessemer. 

 In this episode, Ian shares his expertise on pricing vacation rentals and how to optimize revenue earned from them. 

 

“Expose a bit of that black box. As you said, there might be just a couple of factors. There’s a lot of things that go into the factors, but if you can show like the prices up because of the seasonality versus an event, that creates a lot of trust and if you can show some of the underlying data trends that support that kind of recommendation and decision, it helps out a lot.”  

– Ian Mc Henry

 

 

Get Accelerate Your Subscription Business: Your Blueprint to Packaging & Pricing for Growth Course at https://www.championsofvalue.com   

 

Topics Covered:  

 

01:13 – What is Beyond  Pricing Company 

02:27 – What paved the way for him to Pricing 

03:55 – How to optimize pricing for only a single unit in Airbnb 

05:00 – How to look at external demand data to come up with vacation rental pricing 

06:57 – What other information do they have to pull, especially if there’s  a one-time event coming up 

11:44 – How not to underprice or overprice your vacation rentals 

16:05 – How does Ian price their own product 

21:53 – On trusting the data versus using the data in a black box 

20:23 – His pricing advice that impacts one’s business: “Play with data and segment a lot.” 

 

Key Takeaways: 

 

“I knew it wasn’t true when property managers told us we can’t make income from vacation rentals. I had all the data that tell otherwise. At any rate, we ended up making a lot of money off of it because it was really easy to capture that demand by just dynamically pricing it properly.” – Ian McHenry 

 

“If you’re really trying to figure out to do, play with data and segment a lot like trying to understand demand and willingness to pay across all different kinds of segments you find interesting. I’ve found that you find interesting stuff just playing with the data.” – Ian McHenry 

 

“If you’re building a product like ours where you do have buyers of that data that they need to trust the algorithm and not have it be a black box, one last thing is like expose as much as you can without necessarily giving away the secret sauce because a lot of the problem is getting buy-in for these predictions that you’ve made. – Ian McHenry 

 

“Expose a bit of that black box. Like you said, there might be just a couple of factors. There’s a lot of things that go into the factors, but if you can show like the prices up because of the seasonality versus an event, that creates a lot of trusts and if you can show some of the underlying data trends that support that kind of recommendation and decision, it helps out a lot.” – Ian McHenry  

 

People / Resources Mentioned: 

• JetBlue 
• Allegiant Air 
• Oliver Wyman 
• Southwest Airlines 
• Smith Travel Research  
• Hertz 
• Andrew Watterson 
• Scot Hornick 

 

Connect with Ian McHenry: 

• LinkedIn 
• E: [email protected] 
• https://beyondpricing.com/

 

Connect with Mark Stiving  

• Email: [email protected]  
• LinkedIn  
• Twitter  
• https://www.championsofvalue.com