When I asked John why he thinks some in the industry haven’t been willing to “give it a try,” he said that some have a fear of the unknown, some do not have the resources or time to do it, and then some feel that they may lose control or make a damaging mistake. John remarked, “Fortunately, Wheelhouse provides ’safety curbs,’ so to speak, to protect a user from making devastating mistakes. They offer the ability to set floor and ceiling thresholds in the system to help protect against making mistakes. It’s like they provide a highway and tools for you to operate; there are enough lanes on that highway to navigate in a general manner an operator wishes but also offer the curbs to keep them on the highway.”

While at StayAlfred, John started in sales and reservations which allowed him to develop a sense of the importance of data; they at the time captured 85% of their bookings through their in-bound reservations function. Later, John took on a role in sales and business development. By being involved in Sales, he began to understand how formatting data in an understandable way allowed them to learn how decisions impacted the money they made.

John has leveraged his expertise to take his learnings to other property managers, owners, and hosts and has started leveraging Wheelhouse as his go-to solution to optimize his client’s outcome. He said that being familiar with most, if not all, of the solutions out there, Wheelhouse has developed a complete solution that applies to all inventory types and regions, a solution that his clients take ownership of once they learn the principles of revenue management. Competitive set pricing hasn’t always been the best example of pricing, primarily because if you use outdated hotel data, they have heavy group block bookings that aren’t usually seen by traditional scraping or pricing tools. Vacation Rental inventory also has group booking dynamics that don’t reflect the fundamental nature of booking conditions. Take a family reunion as an example; just because you booked 6 of your 10 units in Phoenix in July doesn’t mean the real market will behave that way. So, you end up with apples and mangos from a comparative perspective. Understanding these potential challenges with just comp set pricing, a user needs to ensure they’re using a superior tool that demonstrates usable and current data to avoid possible pitfalls of this technique. Wheelhouse does that through their advanced pricing model which John has validated against his knowledge from managing multiple markets and has come to trust

John’s advice for vacation rental operators: “Operators should develop a mindset or hypothesis of where they should be and then measure data and results to operate by. When facts surface, you can then drive specific actions.”