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 an essential, not optional, task for the host. In today's post, we talk about techniques for identifying your Airbnb competitors. As a host, you should ask yourself: How does the constant influx 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 get an overview of the following aspects of the neighbourhood:

• Number of listings
• Characteristics of the competition (number of rooms, 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 Airbnb competitors

The easiest way to identify competitors in the holiday rental sector is to use a tool such as Transparent, for example. If you are a new host, identifying your competition is key to determining the base price of your accommodation based on the market. If you are interested in revenue management for holiday rentals, here are some articles that may interest you:

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

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

Identifying Airbnb competition to set dynamic pricing

In the post about smart pricing, we mentioned that, in essence, 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 are interested in learning more about this type of software, take a look at our comparison of tools for tourist accommodation pricing.

The complicated way to identify your Airbnb competitors

Airbnb, Booking, HomeAway are marketplaces – a kind of Amazon for tourist accommodation – so the prerequisites for publishing your listing are extremely low. Therefore, the search filter utility (for users) becomes the perfect tool for identifying your competitors.

#1 Use Airbnb search filters to identify your competitors

Just as potential guests search through hundreds of listings 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-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment that also allows pets. What is the average price you should set in the Chamberí area, Madrid? Using the filters as in the video below, we can determine which tourist accommodations compete with the example one.https://youtu.be/qJf1b5qiKG4 To avoid running these filters all the time, you can bookmark the URL. Additionally, you can further adjust your Airbnb competition analysis by filtering by available dates.

#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 English: software that copies and pastes website content for you. A good free tool is Import.io.

1. Select the URL you want to scrape.
2. Choose the title, price per night, number of reviews, average rating, etc.
3. Click 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 Analyse the spreadsheet to detect trends

Once you have all that Airbnb information, you can further adjust your holiday 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 for analysing your holiday 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 filling out the form below and receive tips like this to increase the profitability of your holiday rental business. Additionally, if you want to forget about key handover, you can check out the smart locks we manufacture.