Vacation rental revenue management software provider, Beyond Pricing, today announced the acquisition of Smart Host, a Techstars alum which provides vacation rental owners and managers with pricing intelligence and recommendations based on competitive sets.
As the industry grows in both size and sophistication, revenue management and dynamic pricing that was once only available to large hotels and airlines is an increasingly vital part of the vacation rental technology stack. Smart Host and Beyond Pricing share a common vision of bringing more sophistication to pricing in the vacation rental market. Beyond Pricing has combined Smart Host’s technology with their proprietary Health Score listing rating system to power a new Nearby Listings feature, launching today.
“With the acquisition, we’ve leveraged some of the Smart Host technology to launch our new Nearby Listings product, which shows you similar listings near your listing, filtered and sorted by our proprietary Health Score, which helps identified well-priced listings,” said Ian McHenry, Beyond Pricing founder and CEO.
According to Smart Host founder, Evan Hammer, “Beyond Pricing and Smart Host’s offerings have always complemented each other. As Beyond Pricing was looking to add a comps feature to their product, it seemed like a great time to partner up.”
“Beyond Pricing was the first automated, predictive dynamic pricing software in the space, when we launched early in 2014,” added McHenry. “We saw a flurry of competitors pop up over the next year. However, we’re seeing more and more consolidation, as evidenced by our acquisition of Smart Host and Everbooked shutting down their automated pricing solution. Integration into PMS systems was the biggest barrier for us when we launched, as most PMS systems didn’t have ways to push prices into their software from an external system, the way hotels do. Over the last two years, we worked with the majority of the top PMS systems to help them open up APIs to be able to that.”
McHenry continued, “What is exciting is that interest in pricing, revenue management, and big data analytics is skyrocketing in ways it wasn’t even three years ago. Over the next two years, we expect to see the majority of managers using something like Beyond Pricing to help with pricing, in combination with some form of market intelligence tool to better arm their reservationists and revenue managers with the data and sophistication to compete in an increasingly sophisticated market.”
