How to identify your competitors on Airbnb or Booking

With more than 6 million listings on Airbnb - and just as many on Booking -, identifying the competition becomes a necessary task for the host, more than optional. In today's post, we talk about techniques to identify your competitors on Airbnb. As a host, you should ask yourself: How does the constant flow of new listings affect my ability to get bookings at the best possible price? The first step is to correctly identify the competition on Airbnb. Doing so will allow you to have an overview of the following aspects of the neighborhood:

• Number of listings
• Characteristics of the competition (number of bedrooms, location, etc.)
• Average prices per night

Below we show you two ways to identify your competitors on Airbnb (or Booking).

The easy way to identify your competitors on Airbnb

The simplest way to identify competitors in the vacation rental sector is to use a tool like Transparent, for example. If you're a new host, identifying your competition is key to determining the base price of your listing based on the market. If you're interested in the topic of revenue management for vacation rentals here are some articles that may interest you:

• Calculating the optimal occupancy rate of your tourist accommodation
• Pricing mistakes on Airbnb

In general, the idea for new listings –without reviews– is that you set a price below the lowest level set by your competition. If you still don't have bookings, lower the price again. Once you have obtained at least three reviews, progressively increase the price to the market level.

Identify Airbnb competition to set dynamic prices

In the post on smart pricing, we talked about how this utility allows you to vary the price based on that of the competition. Each recommendation is based on the identification and analysis of your Airbnb competitors. If you're interested in learning more about this type of software, take a look at our comparison of tools for tourist accommodation prices.

The complicated way to identify your Airbnb competitors

Airbnb, Booking, HomeAway are marketplaces –a kind of Amazon for tourist accommodations–, so the requirements before publishing your ad are minimal. Therefore, the usefulness of search filters (for users) becomes the perfect tool to identify your competitors.

#1 Use Airbnb's search filters to identify your competitors

Just as potential guests search among hundreds of accommodations using filters (number of rooms, extra services, location...), hosts can use them to identify their competition. For example, let's imagine you have a two-room apartment, one bathroom, and it also allows pets. What is the average price you should set in the Chamberí area of Madrid? Using the filters as in the video below, we can determine which tourist accommodations compete with this example. https://youtu.be/qJf1b5qiKG4 To avoid running these filters all the time, you can save the URL to your favorites. Additionally, you can further adjust the competition analysis on Airbnb by filtering by available date.

#2 Export your results to a spreadsheet

Now that you have a complete list of accommodations similar to yours, it's time to export them to a spreadsheet. You can do it manually... but ideally, you should save time. To do this, there are solutions that "scrape" structured data from websites. In plain language: a software that copies and pastes the contents of a web for you. A good free tool is Import.io.

1. You select the URL you want to scrape.
2. You choose the title, price per night, number of reviews, average rating, etc.
3. You click on Start.

From that moment on, the tool will dump all the data into a spreadsheet that you can download or import into your Google Drive account.

#3 Analyze the spreadsheet to detect trends

Once you have all that Airbnb information in your hands, you can further adjust your vacation rental competitor analysis. For example, filter only those that have a similar number of reviews and average rating to yours. You will be finding your direct competitors. Some interesting metrics to analyze your vacation rental competitors are:

• Average number of reviews
• Average price per night
• Average rating in groups:
• Less than 5 reviews
• Between 5 and 20 reviews
• More than 21 reviews

Now that you know who your rivals are, it's time to learn how to compete on Airbnb.Did you like this post on how to identify your competitors on Airbnb? You can subscribe to our newsletter by completing the form below and receive tips like this to increase the profitability of your vacation rental business. In addition, if you want to forget about key delivery, you can take a look at the smart locks we manufacture.