In 2021, Wheelhouse won “Innovation of the Year” at DARM, our industry’s leading data & revenue management conference.

As we accepted the award, we noted that our goal for the next year was to both (a) accelerate our pace of development, and (b) to double-down on our commitment of being a transparent & collaborative partner.

With our recent financing, we have crystalized this ambition into a simple goal:  

Wheelhouse aspires to create category-defining software.

We believe achieving this goal will be predicated on three core principles:

Principle #1:  Your Strategy = the Foundation

Your business is unique.

[ Let us repeat that: Your business is unique! ]

This statement is the foundation of every product & design decision we make.

Yes, your business likely shares the same primary goal as most Wheelhouse users (“Increase the profitability of my portfolio”), but the strategy you pursue and the unique challenges & opportunities in your business mean you will (almost always) want to customize how Wheelhouse serves your needs.

Why? 

Your operating capabilities are unique.

Your risk profile is unique.  

Your customers are unique.

Your brand is unique. 

Your market is unique.

Your listings are unique.

All this means that Wheelhouse’s primary goal must be to create a platform that easily enables you to create, evaluate, modify & automate the pricing strategy that works best for you.

Our pledge as we move forward is to continue to listen & build with you as the foundation of Wheelhouse.

Principle #2: The Future will be Flexible

From both a traveler & supply side, Covid forever changed the shape of our industry.

In vacation destinations, operators who knew their market dynamics and the often names of their annual guests were suddenly faced with widely different travel patterns.

In urban areas, demand for short-term stays collapsed, before the emergence of mid-length altered the accommodations & residential real estate landscapes.

However, even prior to the pandemic, change was afoot in these categories. 

The emergence of new hospitality brands (Sonder, Mint House, Zeus, Sentral, Roami, Black Swan, etc.) has been driven primarily by the goal of serving travelers & residents who are seeking flexible, furnished, amenity-rich spaces, available for “2 to 200+” nights.

As noted above, we believe these shifts in travel patterns do not reflect a fad. They reflect the future. 

However, regardless of where our market settles, we believe that travel patterns – and therefore revenue opportunities – will continue to shift, faster than ever, as hospitality products continue to more closely resemble other consumer products, where consumer preferences shift quickly.

Therefore, everything we build at Wheelhouse – from our pricing engine and our data tools, to our software interfaces & product lines – is designed to serve as your future-proofed foundation in this rapidly change world.

Principle #3:  Transparency is Table Stakes

In 2021, Wheelhouse became our category’s first fully transparent pricing platform.

What does “fully transparent” look like?

Wheelhouse publishes extensive pricing engine research.

Wheelhouse surfaces our pricing engine – for each customer – in the product.

All data & updates on Wheelhouse can be audited & exported.

Why does this matter?

Historically, pricing engines have been “black boxes.”    

This lack of transparency means it’s difficult for customers to discern how – or even if – a pricing engine is effectively adjusting prices around evolving market conditions.

Additionally, for years, teams have refused to publish research showing even rudimentary details that would allay concerns about whether teams were investing in the very difficult statistics & ML work required to build an effective pricing engine.

We find this deficiency disappointing, to say the least.

Over time, we expect some aspects of the “black box” era of software will be viewed as risky, insufficient & disingenuous.

Moving forward, transparency must be table stakes for our category. The operators & entrepreneurs in our space deserve nothing less.