Vacation Rental Scale-Up

Owners pushing you to cut rates because next week is still open? Late bookings have lower average rates mainly because smaller, cheaper homes are the ones booking late. It doesn’t always mean rates were lowered. Sally Henry, VP of Market Intelligence and Insights at KeyData, shared that finding with Thibault Masson, founder of RSU by PriceLabs, during a free RSU by PriceLabs webinar on October 28,...

No more washing dishes before checkout? Guests might be celebrating. But for Airbnb hosts and property managers, the bigger question is: Who decides what's reasonable to ask of guests? Starting November 20, Airbnb is changing how house rules work. Binding rules are limited to Airbnb's predefined categories, while everything else becomes a nonbinding request. So, Thibault Masson put Airbnb&...

Are you risking your Vrbo listing by offering discounts on your own website? Property managers and hosts could face listing removal or penalties on Vrbo if their direct booking rates are lower than what is published on the platform. Vrbo is rolling out updated terms starting October 29 that move every host to a flat 12% commission model. Alongside this fee shift, Vrbo is introducing a strict rate...

The Airbnb 2026 fall update changes how guests find your listing in two main ways. First, guests can now speak or type what they want in their own words, like "a house in Nashville for tonight", and AI turns that sentence into a location, dates, and filters to match them with your property. Second, guests can now tap into a verified network of real travelers to see where their friends st...

Owner acquisition used to be a one-to-many business: one message, one landing page, one pitch, sent to everybody on your list. Brooke Pfautz argues that constraint is gone, and that the managers who adjust fastest will sign owners the slow way never could. Brooke built Vantage Resort Realty in Ocean City, Maryland from nothing to 500 properties in five years, sold it in 2013, and now runs Vintory...

Two European decisions landed roughly 48 hours apart, and on the surface they have nothing to do with each other. Google removed the vacation rentals section from Search across the European Economic Area — the EU plus Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein — as its own chosen remedy to a Digital Markets Act decision. Then the European Commission proposed the Affordable Housing Act, which would require...

For a decade, cities have blamed short-term rentals for taking homes off the market. Airbnb has played defence the whole time. On 14 September, it changed tack and put $250 million into building housing instead. The timing is worth noting. Five days earlier, the European Commission proposed the Affordable Housing Act, which would let cities under housing stress restrict commercial short-term renta...

Airbnb is offering select hosts a new “Direct Booking Link” with a much lower 6% or 10% host fee . The question is: if Airbnb still processes the booking and controls the guest relationship, how “direct” is it? 🤔 In this episode, Uvika Wahi breaks down what Airbnb is testing and why the distinction matters for short-term rental operators. We cover: How Airbnb’s 6% and 10% fees work 🔗 Direct book...

When Airbnb shifted operators to a single 15.5% host fee, many short-term rental managers assumed a simple price markup would keep their revenue neutral. However, financial analysts at Bernstein and Airbnb leadership view this structural shift as a primary catalyst for business acceleration and recent stock gains. In this episode, we break down the three distinct mechanisms Wall Street is banking...

Shoulder season isn't summer on a dimmer switch. It's a reset, and this episode treats it that way. Jay Whiteley, who runs revenue, marketing, and distribution for ViewStay by Casago's roughly 4,500 properties, joins RSU by PriceLabs editor Uvika Wahi and host Kyle Driskell, Manager, RM Partnerships, to break down what changes when peak season ends: who's actually traveling now, wh...

I booked a trip to a small village in Alsace, and once I was in, I started paying attention to what Airbnb was actually selling me. The homepage had a car rental discount and a luggage storage deal waiting before I'd even packed. My trip page, the first thing I opened after booking, knew my address, my dates, and how many of us were coming, and started selling from there. But when I got to Air...

Airbnb just reported 3.6 billion dollars in revenue, nights booked up 10%, and raised guidance for the rest of the year. On paper, one of its best quarters ever. Look closer, and a good chunk of that growth traces back to changes property managers have spent the year worried about, from the new single fee to Reserve Now Pay Later's rising share of bookings. In this episode, we walk through wha...

Guests have stopped opening fifty tabs. They open one AI prompt — family of four, two kids under ten, beach, four days, this budget — and book from the shortlist that comes back. So when that shortlist gets assembled, is your business even readable? 📺 Watch the screen demos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVWQb2x6zHw 📖 Step-by-step recap and handouts: https://www.rentalscaleup.com/ai-workflows-...

How do you make sure that when ChatGPT recommends your short-term rental, the guest actually clicks "book"? 🤔 While everyone is racing to get surfaced by AI search tools, a mere citation on Claude or Perplexity does not move money. A human still has to click through, weigh your trust signals, and decide to pay. How do you make sure your AI visibility actually turns into paying guests?...

Most revenue tools still make you log in, click through, and cross-reference before you get an answer. This episode tests what happens when you skip all of that — wiring a live pricing engine straight into an AI assistant and asking it questions in plain English instead. I connected PriceLabs to Claude using its new MCP (Model Context Protocol) connector and put it through real tasks: diagnosing a...

Vrbo's newest ads, Magician and No Chef, are the ones getting all the buzz right now. Big spend, big view counts, the full spotlight moment. 🎬So why bring up a much quieter content campaign running in the background at the same time? Because with major booking platforms, it's rarely the loudest release that teaches you the most. This time, the real playbook is buried in a low-key campaign...

Airbnb just promised Wall Street it would extract more money from every single booking this year. Yet, your platform fees aren’t going up, and your payouts remain untouched. So, where is that massive revenue growth coming from? 🛑💳 While operators have been pressured to simplify pricing and fold cleaning fees into their nightly rates to show guests "one honest number," Airbnb has quietl...

Should you build your own custom AI workflows, or wait for your software vendors to roll out their updates? In this episode, Thibault Masson sits down with Mark Simpson to break down exactly how independent operators can leverage artificial intelligence to automate their operations and scale revenue. In this episode, we cover: Level 1 (The Foundations): How to use Custom Instructions and Custom GP...

The rules of organic search visibility are undergoing a major shift. For years, professional operators have structured their businesses around strict performance metrics to secure Vrbo’s Premier Host badge and its promised visibility boost. 🛑📉 But what happens when platforms introduce paid shortcuts? In this episode, we break down Expedia Group's new sponsored listings feature on Vrbo, shift...

Airbnb’s new "risk-free" cancellation policy might guarantee your payout, but it could be silently draining your operational budget. 🛑💸 In this episode of the RSU Podcast, Thibault Masson (Founder of RSU by PriceLabs) breaks down Airbnb's newly rolled out "Extended Cancellation Option"—a feature that allows guests to cancel up to 24 hours before check-in. While Airbnb abs...

Airbnb just made two major corporate moves that signal an aggressive expansion beyond traditional short-term rentals: they poached Booking.com’s top hotel executive and invested $58 million to build a real-life social network. 🛑📉 In this episode of the RSU Podcast, Uvika Wahi (Short-Term Rental Industry Analyst and Editor at RSU by PriceLabs) unpacks these parallel strategies and what they mean...

Your dynamic pricing strategy might be flawless—but bad listing photos, inflexible cleaning fees, and over-promised owner estimates are silently destroying your short-term rental revenue. 🛑💸 In this episode of RSU by PriceLabs, Thibault Masson sits down with Bryant Loy (Director of Revenue Management at Brett/Robinson) and Becca Madigan (Manager of U.S. Solutions at PriceLabs) to uncover the hid...

Airbnb's 2026 Summer Release just rewrote the rules of how guests discover, evaluate, and book your property. 🛑📉With this update, Airbnb hasn't just rolled out new features—the platform has fundamentally inserted an AI layer into every single monetizable decision point of the guest journey. From discovery to booking, AI is now sitting between your property and your prospective guest. In...

If Airbnb guarantees the lowest price on hotels, how will your short-term rentals compete? 🛑📉 On May 20th, Brian Chesky is dropping the Summer 2026 Release, and the platform's priorities are shifting. To hedge against strict city regulations, Airbnb is aggressively pushing boutique hotel supply—and they might back it up with a low-price guarantee that puts standard STR listings at a massive...

✈️ Jet Fuel Crisis, 20,000 Cancelled Flights, and a Domestic Travel Boom — Which Side of the Line Is Your Portfolio On? Jet fuel prices have doubled and airlines are cutting 20,000 summer flights. ⛽📉 Guests still want to travel — they're just driving instead. But this isn't a COVID staycation repeat, and the windfall isn't guaranteed for everyone. 🚗 In this episode, we break down:...