Welcome along to the new episode of the Boosely Podcast. Today we are shining the spotlight on price labs and also on the book Direct Blueprint, which is an up and coming book sort of collated by Mark Simpson and really talks about industry experts and leaders from all areas of hospitality and services that you need to know about as a host yourself.

Today we're really excited because we're actually joined by two of the members from price labs. We've got Anarag, who is the co-founder of price labs. We've got Tibo, who is the head of the outreach and growth side of things. Is that right Tibo? Yeah, that's about right. Awesome, awesome.

So today we're going to dive straight into it and really bring those guys into the conversation and let's find out more about price labs and why something that you as a host need to know about as well. So welcome along Anarag. Thank you so much, Liam.

Welcome along to Tibo. Hello, Liam and hello to the whole Boosely family. Thank you so much for joining us. So let's dive straight in and first question, we'll go to you Anarag, which is how did the book come about and why did you get involved in the book Direct Blueprint?

Yeah, so we generally, I don't know if everybody knows about price labs or not, but we are more on the data and dynamic pricing side of things and not necessarily the book direct movement directly.

What has happened over the years is a lot of our customers do have their own direct booking websites and this question always kept coming up that hey, I'm using you guys for dynamic pricing.

It gets published through my PMS through these different OTAs, but how do I get those dynamic prices on my own website, which a lot of times they were hosted via some WordPress plugins or things like that.

So this question kept coming up and at one point many, many years back, I reached out to Mark to say like, hey, what's up here? What do we need to do to get these rates? And he gave a very clear answer of how this distribution is supposed to happen.

But frankly, Mark and I started talking right about this, about other topics as well. There were other members of the Boosely community who were using price labs, so he had heard of us.

I think earlier this year, he reached out to say we are doing a follow up book on book direct and we want to get thoughts from multiple perspectives this time.

And the thought was can a big group of us, which who each specialized in a certain part of this vacation rental ecosystem come together and write a chapter on what they know about it.

So that's where it started off and then we were happy to contribute.

Put down whatever little we know about book direct and a lot that we know about any management and and married them together and then put us after.

I mean, revenue management and particularly whether it's book direct or not is just so important. I know that I used to spend the days trying to choose the perfect rate and I ended up on that typical host who ended up where I had two different pricing one for winter one for summer.

And exactly there's there's a part of I'm lucky enough to see some of the your chapter beforehand and you're absolutely right. That's exactly what most people do actually mentions it in there.

And whether I had lots of book in sometimes or no book into others, that was that was what the result was just by having that what message would you say to people who are listening, who are in that similar boat.

You mean the boat of setting maybe two rates a year.

My number one message to anybody who has never dabbled into revenue management or dynamic pricing is

if you have access to it, you probably have somewhere where all your bookings sit just go look at different months and see how each month has performed over the years and you'll start to see a pattern like summer.

It's not summer and winter. If you break it down July and August are probably different although they are both in a lot of places peak months June is probably very different from August.

And so like you can break it down by month, but then you break it down by day of week and you realize okay there is a weekend versus week day pattern there's so much going on that setting two rates all year is is is not the right thing.

The least I tell anybody is look at seasons a little more granularly than just summer and winter because there's also a shoulder season in between where if you're not looking at it carefully either price too high or to go look at your week patterns and one of the like real sort of no winners that we see in our industry is because the industry is so fragmented.

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