We talk about how to prepare owners, reservationists, your channel manager, your PMS, your website, and everyone else in your organization for the changes that occur when you switch to modern, data-driven dynamic pricing and revenue management for your vacation rental company

1. Preparing Your Company for
Dynamic Pricing
Ian McHenry, CEO, Beyond Pricing
Dru Brown, Director of Sales and Marketing, The Vacation Company
Ned Lucks, CTO, Bluetent

2. Learning Objectives
• Learn how to retrain your staff to handle guests not used
to changing prices
• Understand how dynamic pricing affects the different
vendors and software you use
• Plan how to communicate dynamic pricing to your
owners

3. Panel
• Ian McHenry, CEO, Beyond Pricing
• Dru Brown, Director of Sales and Marketing, The Vacation
Company
• Ned Lucks, CTO, Bluetent

4. Preparing Your Company for Dynamic Pricing
• Going from setting rates once per year with a handful of
seasons to having rates that change every single day has
a lot of implications for all levels of your organization.
• We'll show you the 5 things you need to do now to make
sure you're setup to take advantage of dynamic pricing.

5. What Is Dynamic Pricing?
• Dynamic pricing is pricing based on changes in supply
and demand
• Ways people dynamically price:
• Manually – increasing or decreasing rates because you see
changes in the market or your competitors
• Using occupancy or time-based rules to adjust prices
• Using an automated, data-driven revenue management
software

6. 5 Things to Do to Get Ready
• 1) Retrain Your Reservations Staff
• 2) Get Your Website Ready
• 3) Make Sure Your PMS and Channel Manager Can
Handle Dynamic Rates
• 4) Get Your Owners Onboard
• 5) Ease Into It

7. Retraining Your Reservations Staff
• Old Way:
• PDF quotes that are good forever
• Rate tables for outside agents that change once per year
• New Way:
• Rates are no longer good forever (max 24 hours)
• Use changing rates to encourage guests to book now and drive
conversion

8. Retraining Your Reservations Staff
• How to deal with:
• Repeat guests
• Guests who try to book a few weeks later and price has
changed
• Travel agents who used to just use your annual rate table

9. Getting Your Website Ready
• Old Way:
• Static rate table with seasonal rates
• New Way:
• Live quoting from your PMS
• New ways of displaying your rates

10. Getting Your Website Ready
Old Way: Static Rate Table

11. Getting Your Website Ready
New Way: Rate Table w/ Seasonal Ranges

12. Getting Your Website Ready
New Way: Rates on Calendar View

13. Getting Your Website Ready
New Way: Live Quote

14. Can Your PMS & Channel Manager Handle It?
• Old Way
• PMS & channel manager produce a seasons-based rate feed
• New Way
• PMS & channel manager translate rates into a daily rate feed
(with or without length-of-stay variations)
• Live quoting

15. Can Your PMS & Channel Manager Handle It?
• Common Issues:
• PMS doesn’t produce an accurate rate feed that translates dynamic
rates into a price-per-day
• PMS produces two feeds (one season-based and one with a different
price per day) and channel manager doesn’t pull from the right one
• Rate adjustment rules only work with live quoting
• 365 rates changing everyday is too much of a load on their servers

16. Get Your Owners Onboard
• Old Way
• Every year you agree on rates with owners and maybe a max %
you can discount (often laid out in the actual owner contract)
• New Way
• Owners allow property managers to use their expertise to set
rates

17. Get Your Owners Onboard
• Common Issues
• Picky owners wanting to dictate all pricing
• Owners worried that their prices are different than their
neighbors’
• Contracts don’t allow for dynamic pricing

18. Ease Into It
• Set some boundaries (minimums and maximums)
• Start with your most progressive owners
• Use data to see where you stand relative to the market
• Get excited!

19. Q&A

20. Evaluation
We’d love to hear your feedback
on this session!
Please “rate this session” by selecting this session in the
VRMA National Conference Mobile App.

21. Still Have Questions?
Ian McHenry, Beyond Pricing:
ian@beyondpricing.com
Dru Brown, The Vacation Company:
dru@vacationcompany.com
Ned Lucks, Bluetent:
ned@bluetent.com