Should Your Hotel Comp Set Include Airbnbs?

A family of five searching your town on Booking.com sees your two connecting rooms right next to a three-bedroom apartment. If your competitive set only lists hotels, you never see that comparison. The family does.

That does not mean you should price like a holiday rental. It means you should know when rentals compete for your guests, and let hotel data keep driving your rates the rest of the time. This guide shows how to do both.

Which of Your Guests Also Look at Rentals?

Short-term rentals don't compete for every booking. They compete for certain trips. Check your reservations from the last 12 months and look for three groups:

• Families and groups booking two or more rooms together.
• Stays of four nights or longer, where a kitchen and laundry start to matter.
• Event dates, when visitors want to stay together close to a venue.

If these make up a big share of your revenue, rentals belong on your radar.

You can check this with a basic export from your PMS. Pull every reservation from the last 12 months with three columns: number of rooms booked, number of nights, and total revenue. Then tag each booking:

1. Mark any booking with two or more rooms as a group.
2. Mark any booking of four nights or more as a long stay.
3. Mark any booking that falls on a date you know had a local event.

Add up the revenue in each tagged group and divide it by your total revenue. That share is your rental exposure. A B&B near a beach might find half its revenue sits in these groups. A business hotel downtown might find almost none. If most of your guests are solo business travelers on one- or two-night stays, rentals matter far less.

Keep Hotels at the Center of Your Price

Watching rentals and pricing off them are two different things. In PriceLabs, the Customize Pricing Data Source setting decides how much hotel data and how much short-term rental data shape your recommended price:

• Fully STR: 0% hotel data
• Mostly STR: 10% hotel data
• Balance: 50% hotel data, suggested for aparthotels
• Mostly Hotel: 90% hotel data
• Fully Hotel: 100% hotel data

For hotels, PriceLabs suggests Fully Hotel or Mostly Hotel. Mostly Hotel keeps a small share of rental data in the mix, which suits a B&B or small hotel whose families and longer stays overlap with local rentals. Hotel weights and hotel comp sets are by-request features, so email [email protected] if you don't see them in your account. If your property is truly half hotel and half apartment, our aparthotel pricing strategy guide covers the Balance setting in depth.

Choose how much hotel data and short-term rental data shape your recommended price

Pick Your Hotel Competitors on Purpose

By default, PriceLabs compares you with your 10 nearest hotels. Nearest is not always most similar. A budget motel down the road can drag your benchmark down.

Switch to your own list in the Hotel Rate Shopper. You can:

• choose from up to 350 properties, filtered by distance, number of reviews, star rating, review score, unit count, property type and average price
• pick competitors on a map
• add a missing competitor with its Booking.com property ID or URL, as long as it is within 200 km (up to 20 added this way)

Competitor rates come from Booking.com and update every 24 hours. Our walkthrough of custom comp sets shows each screen step by step.

Pick the properties you actually lose bookings to, not just the closest ones

Compare Like With Like

A competitor's cheapest room tells you little if your guest wants a family room with breakfast. Room Type Matching lets you link each of your room types to the closest room at each competitor, such as your Deluxe Room to their Superior Room. If you leave a room type unmatched, the comparison falls back to the competitor's best available rate for two people.

Once you have matched at least one competitor, you can also filter their rates by:

• length of stay, from 1 to 4 nights
• refundable or non-refundable
• breakfast included or not

Now a three-night family stay with breakfast is compared with the same kind of offer.

Two smaller tools help with regular reviews. You can reorder competitors so the ones you care about most sit at the top of the table. You can also download a CSV of your selected competitors' rates for the next 366 days, based on the stay length you pick. That file is handy for an owner meeting or a quarterly review.

Room Type Matching compares your rooms with equivalent rooms at each competitor

Watch Out for Rental Price Traps

Rental prices are easy to misread. A rental's nightly rate often leaves out cleaning and service fees that only appear at checkout. A three-bedroom house also sleeps more people than your double room. Before you decide a rental is cheaper, compare the full price of the stay for the same number of guests.

Review Your Comp Set Every Quarter

Markets change. New hotels open. Rental supply grows or shrinks with local rules. Your own guest mix shifts. Put a review in your calendar every three months, and after any big change near you. Our hotel comp set guide covers how to choose and rank your rivals.