Revenue Management Strategies with Jordan Locke (Ep 612)

In this episode, Jasper Ribbers interviews Jordan Locke, the founder of RevParty Consulting, about revenue management strategies for short-term rentals. They discuss the importance of revenue management, understanding guest avatars, pricing strategies for special events, adjusting pricing for high-demand dates, and utilizing OTA promotions. They also cover practical tips for increasing revenue and the importance of scheduling time for revenue management. Jordan provides his contact information for those interested in learning more about his services.

Takeaways

Revenue management is the practice of maximizing revenue by constantly improving how much money you make.
Understanding guest avatars and their preferences can help you tailor your pricing strategy and attract the right guests.
Utilizing OTA promotions can increase visibility and attract more bookings.
Setting minimum night stays can help optimize your calendar and prevent undesirable bookings.
Scheduling dedicated time for revenue management is crucial for monitoring pricing, adjusting strategies, and staying on top of market trends.

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Jasper Ribbers (00:01.368)
What's up everybody. Welcome back to Get Paid for Your Pad. And today we're really gonna talk about how to get paid for your pad because we're gonna talk about revenue management. And my guest today, Jordan Locke, he's the founder of RevParty Consulting and revenue management consulting service. And we're gonna dive into revenue management strategies, how to make more money. So Jordan, welcome to the show.

Jordan (00:11.426)
like yesterday.

Jordan (00:25.278)
Thanks for having me. It's gonna be a lot of fun and I'd love to share what I know about revenue management and help people get paid for their pad.

Jasper Ribbers (00:33.004)
Yeah, that's right. Well, why don't you give us a quick background? I know you've been in the industry for quite a while. What got you into short-term rentals and revenue management?

Jordan (00:42.53)
Yeah, so I've always been in pricing actually, and I've priced a lot of different things. Oil and gas, water balloon fillers, toilet seats, computer chips, bananas, if you name it, I've probably tried to price it at some point in time. And about eight, nine years ago, there was a startup here in Austin just getting into vacation rentals. They didn't have anybody that knew what to do with revenue management.

And they said, do you want to come over and try to make this up? And I said, that sounds like fun. Let's give it a shot. And then I stayed in vacation miles ever since.

Jasper Ribbers (01:19.512)
Got it. And you also have your own short term rental units? Okay. Got it. Got it. So let me start off with this. I know there's a lot of confusion around revenue management really is like, well, how do you describe revenue management?

Jordan (01:23.339)
I do not.

Jordan (01:34.782)
Yeah, so I think for revenue management, you kind of have to be okay with trying to attain something that's not 100% graspable. It has to be a theoretical idea of maximizing revenue. And so it's just always trying to improve how much money you make, right? And there's lots of different ways to go about it. There's lots of different strategies that people talk about. But honestly, you could do lots of different strategies. You can pull in strategies from

Jasper Ribbers (01:53.117)
Mm-hmm.

Jordan (02:04.458)
and it'll probably help you make some money. And so really it's just finding what strategy really works to price your pet.

Jasper Ribbers (02:12.42)
How do you price a banana?

Jordan (02:14.614)
who prides the banana. It depends on what season it is. So that's important. And then also, there's a thing like, I joke around and I call it banana pacing, because just like how vacation rentals, people measure the kind of pacing. Bananas, that's how they ripen. And so they actually have a specific sort of gas that makes them get more and more ripe and turn more and more yellow. And they have certain special rooms for these to get them more ripe before they go to the grocery store. So you kind of have to like.

key tabs on banana pasting and how long they're going to be ripe for to figure out how much you need to sell.

Jasper Ribbers (02:49.536)
That's amazing, man. I'd love to learn more about that off record. So I know you work with a lot of clients. You have different portfolios throughout the country. Like what are you seeing so far in 2024? We're about two months in, which damn, we're already two months in. That's crazy. Anyway.

Jordan (02:55.195)
Thank you.

Jordan (03:08.974)
I know. Yeah, I mean, we're seeing some of what we expected from 2023. So like I thought, you know, rates are a little more compressed. You might be a little more aggressive on price and competitive early on. I would say that some of my worries I had to kind of December, January are a little less so now. December and January for most of my clients was a pretty slow season.

but that doesn't seem to really carry on to February, February and March are looking pretty good. So I'm a little more optimistic probably for 2024 now than I was at the beginning of the year.

Jasper Ribbers (03:46.092)
Right. Yeah, I'm kind of seeing a similar thing. January was pretty slow for most of my portfolios. And then it's starting to look a lot better, especially this summer, especially in the northern ski regions and northern US, like Canada. I'm actually seeing pacing really ahead of schedule for May throughout, all the way through September. Is that something that you see as well?

Jordan (04:09.354)
Yeah, I wouldn't say we're like really filling out super strong, but we are pacing ahead and those really kind of key weekends, you know, are already getting booked really far in advance. So you really have to kind of stay on top of your calendar because if you don't check it, you know, you might end up with a couple of missing weeks here in a little bit.

Jasper Ribbers (04:29.389)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, do you think, when we look at, I look at July, August in some markets and I'm just kind of amazed by how much the capacity is on the books already. And do you think, is that a, could that be a change in booking window or does that indicate that there's going to be more demand for those months?

Jordan (04:48.462)
there is going to be a little bit more demand for those months, but I think it's kind of displaced from other time periods in the year. So I think, you know, kind of with the post-pandemic and the pence of demand and the work from home and all the things that everybody's been talking about, right, everybody was just a little more flexible. And I think, you know, you started to see it in 2023, but now especially in 2024, people are going to travel at those more traditional times, summer, spring break, winter break, things like that.

Jasper Ribbers (04:56.556)
Hmm.

Jasper Ribbers (05:17.192)
Right. Got it. Essentially we're going back to normal. We're going back to what it used to be.

Jordan (05:20.586)
Yep. Normal vacations.

Jasper Ribbers (05:24.637)
All right, OK, that makes sense. That makes sense. Are you making any adjustments to your pricing strategy for the summer and those high demand dates to really capture the most revenue there?

Jordan (05:35.606)
Yeah, so we've definitely bumped up our rates a little bit, since we got some business on the books. And then I would say is one thing is we're trying to make sure we really protect some of those key dates. And maybe that means like using a minimum length of stay as well, right? Because we're starting to see, you know, those bookings coming early and sometimes it might be just a weekend. You don't have a minimum length of stay. And so you don't want to start all your weekends of in August when you're in February. You probably miss the boat if you do that. So.

Jasper Ribbers (06:03.156)
Mm-hmm.

Jordan (06:04.77)
We're really looking at not only price, but also arrival and minimum length of stay kind of restrictions to help balance out summer.

Jasper Ribbers (06:13.316)
Gotcha. Let's talk about peak dates because I've been working with somebody who has some units that are right on the solar eclipse path and people are paying some crazy rates to see that solar eclipse. But then it's really, it's kind of hard to estimate how much can we charge, right? Because we also don't want to miss out on the demand at all. It's kind of goes back to discussions we've…

people have been having around like the Super Bowl and like the Taylor Swift concert. It's like, you know, you can charge a premium, but how do you figure out how much you can charge?

Jordan (06:50.058)
Yeah, so I think that's kind of interesting. I think the first thing I would do is try to find comparable events. It's like Super Bowls and Taylor Swift, that's what people try to do usually is find something comparable that they can base it off of. I think things that are like natural events like a solar eclipse are a little more different because it's so geographically kind of spread. And then also those are probably likely more drive to sort of destinations. And so it's probably gonna be

at least some sort of peak pricing, but it's probably going to be strongly influenced by the disposable income available in your area within a couple of hours.

Jasper Ribbers (07:30.9)
Right. So if there's some really rich areas, you might be able to charge a lot more.

Jordan (07:35.85)
Yeah, like I'm sure Joshua tree, right? Probably tons of money. If you're in the middle of Kansas, probably gotta keep it a little cheaper.

Jasper Ribbers (07:42.884)
Right. Got it. Yeah. Cause you know, we were looking at, you know, how, you know, you can see in the pricing tools, you can see like what other properties are getting booked at, right? The calendar, actual calendars. And we noticed that most properties were charging around like 800, 1000 a night, but then there was one property that got booked at 3000, you know? So I was thinking, damn, like, but I don't want, I'm not necessarily want to put the price for our unit at 3000 as well. Cause I don't know if there's someone else.

Jordan (07:53.133)
Never mind.

Jasper Ribbers (08:12.536)
that's going to be willing to pay for that. But maybe that person just got lucky or, you know, like it's, it's kind of hard to, cause with normal periods, like high season, low season, shoulder season, like it's pretty clear what you can charge from just looking at, you know, other similar listings, but with these peak dates, it's like, there only, there has to be like one person with a lot of money who was like, you know what? I don't care. I just want my, my children to see the solar eclipse. And if I have to pay free grand, I'm paying free grand.

Jordan (08:12.552)
Mm-hmm.

Jordan (08:39.498)
Yeah, and I think it depends to what kind of event it is and who's traveling. So I'm in Austin. I'm Austin based, South by Southwest, huge festival, sells out the town is, you know, by far the biggest event here. Um, but we also have F1 that comes to town. It's still a big event, but much smaller than South by, uh, but the rates are so much higher because the kind of people that come into town for F1 just, you know, have the money to spend. And so I think it's.

kind of like that, you have to think about who's gonna be traveling to the solar eclipse or what kind of house they want if they really care about the solar eclipse. And then another thing is, you can kind of use game theory a little bit if you don't know what to do. And so, you know, if we're looking at this solar eclipse, and we don't know if we can go for three grand, or if we can go for a couple hundred dollars, you might just want to watch and see kind of what the current prices in the market and how quickly it's pacing. And if it's going slower, then everybody's probably overpriced.

going to be a race to a bottom and you're going to be trying to cover your losses. And so if that's the case, you might want to kind of undercut early. But if it's booking out and everybody's buying $3,000 houses, then, you know, just, just hold your ground.

Jasper Ribbers (09:43.8)
Mm-hmm.

Jasper Ribbers (09:48.768)
Right. Yeah. I guess that's the other tricky thing to understand is the booking window, right? Because like I was looking at pacing, obviously pacing is way ahead of last year, because last year there was no solar eclipse, right? So yeah, pacing is way ahead. But then, you know, I was having a discussion with this person of like, because the client was saying that, well, like, what if everyone's already booked? Like it's a solar eclipse. People book way in advance for that, right?

Jordan (09:58.529)
I'm afraid.

Jasper Ribbers (10:16.248)
Like I don't want to miss out on everybody. And so I was like, yeah, how do you estimate that booking window for such a specific event?

Jordan (10:24.298)
Yeah, it's honestly really, really hard. I tend to stay away from the idea that we'll kind of hold out to the last minute and sell once everybody's sold out. Because if you think about it, there's not too many times that like an entire area actually sells out, right? Maybe like the Super Bowl or the World Cup or something, but like very rarely does an entire area absolutely sell out.

And then there's hotels too, right? If they absolutely want to stay, they probably have hotel rooms that are open that they can stay at. So I would always like hedge my bet and kind of try to go a little earlier rather than hold on my cards the whole time. But as far as knowing what the optimal place is to sell, like that's just, it's really hard for unique events like that. Especially like the solar eclipse. I always think of like weather and I'm like.

Jasper Ribbers (11:11.321)
Yeah.

Jordan (11:14.69)
how long are people gonna wait till they can kind of get an idea if it's gonna be cloudy or not, or if it's gonna rain, or, and like, I'm only a revenue manager. I don't have a meteorology degree, so I'm not sure how that plays in, but I'm sure it's some sort of factor, right?

Jasper Ribbers (11:30.524)
No, a hundred percent. Like, cause the Sodor Eclipse, I'm sure it's much more beautiful if they're, if it's this clear sky, right? Exactly. So like, I think, I think you have a point there where it's like, oh, like, you know, a week in advance, you look at the weather and like, oh, it's going to be clear sky, there might be some last minute demand there if it's going to be raining, you know, people might be like, you know what, next time.

Jordan (11:31.205)
haha

Jordan (11:37.078)
Yeah, yeah, sure.

Jordan (11:52.402)
I think it's also interesting. So people talk a lot about the big events that drive peak seasons and lots of money. I've been thinking lately a lot the other way around about trigger events or what causes people to start booking these things. And so the most obvious answer, for example, is a concert, right? When someone drops the line up, people go and buy tickets, and that's kind of a trigger event. I think there's probably some trigger events for things like a solar eclipse, too.

You'd probably wait till it starts getting a little warmer and nicer outside and you see a clear sky and you think, hey, it would be nice to see this solar eclipse. Like maybe I should check it out. I think they did a study before to figure out when people bought winter coats. And they found out that it has to drop 12 degrees within 14 days. And then people will go buy a winter coat because they think it's starting to get cold. And so I'm sure there's all sorts of small things like that apply to vacation rentals as well.

Jasper Ribbers (12:46.816)
Mm.

Jordan (12:51.768)
which is different things that happen in our life make us look in different ways.

Jasper Ribbers (12:56.42)
That's what makes being a revenue manager so interesting. You have to be a psychologist. You have to be a weatherman. You have to be so many different things.

Jordan (13:03.931)
It's also why you always feel like you don't know what you're talking about, but…

Jasper Ribbers (13:10.164)
I know. And today we were on the revenue management panel and then somebody made a remark and saying that, yeah, we have to have all these different skill sets in order to really do a good job. But then also, like, we never know if we're actually right. You know, because you never know, oh, you could have made more maybe.

Jordan (13:26.577)
I think

I think John DeRule before at a conference, I think it was him, he said, being a revenue manager is just constantly questioning yourself until you have an existential crisis. Which I think is probably pretty true of the job.

Jasper Ribbers (13:43.572)
I know it reminds me of my days as a trader in the financial world. Uh, you know, whenever, whenever I would do a trade that would make money, I would feel bad because I thought, cause I would think, damn, I should have done this bigger, right? If I didn't make money, then I was mad as well. Now I make the wrong trade. So you're never happy.

Jordan (13:54.766)
Mm-hmm.

Jordan (13:58.229)
Hahaha.

Jordan (14:02.026)
No, it's the same in revenue management, even with like owners, property managers, people that don't even do revenue management, but you know, like use it in their business, they can tell you if the price is too high and they can tell you if the price is too low and like you can see if you go to a restaurant, like, you know, if you felt like you overpaid or if it was a bargain. Um, and so that's just like kind of also part of the job is everybody's going to have an opinion on how you price it. And they're going to think either you should have went more or you should have went less.

Jasper Ribbers (14:29.752)
Right. Yeah, in Holland we have an expression that says, the best captains are on land. Does that make sense?

Jordan (14:38.166)
Yeah, I like it. I've never heard that one, but I'm going to start using it.

Jasper Ribbers (14:45.)
Alright, sounds good. Let's talk a little bit about some…

Some different like strategies, like, like if I'm a host with, let's say like five to 10 units, um, you know, there's a lot of hosts out there who haven't really focused on revenue management because, you know, last five years, 10 years, it's been like pretty easy to make money and now it's becoming more competitive. It was really like 2003 was really the first year where everyone's like, oh damn, like stuff getting competitive. Like we need to start educating ourselves and need to start understanding what we're doing because, you know, otherwise it's

Jordan (15:03.73)
Mm-hmm.

Jasper Ribbers (15:17.452)
You know, you got to make a mortgage or your master lease, or you got to drive revenue for your clients or they're walking away. So, you know, I feel like revenue management has gotten like really important in the last couple of years. So the people that haven't really looked into it, they are hosts of 510 listings. What, where do you start? Other than like just having a pricing tool.

Jordan (15:40.03)
Yeah, so I think, to hit on your point, I think revenue management becomes more and more important kind of during the slow season or during the rougher times. I think it's much easier to be a competent revenue manager or at least get close to kind of your target when times are good. And revenue managers really earn their salary when times are rough. And so if you've never done revenue management before, or you just wanna kind of start stepping it up, I always tell people to look at kind of what makes them

unique or different that kind of separates them from everything else because I know everybody says right every property is unique and special and it is but what you have to do is find out like what's sellable, what's valuable, what's going to change the booking behavior, what's going to change the kind of guest you get and how's that going to change your strategy? Does that mean you're targeting families earlier on, romantic couples, is it a shorter booking window?

Just the more you can kind of segment, right? That's what they call it in hotels. The more you can kind of segment, the more effective you'll be. And you can do that whether you have 100 properties or one.

Jasper Ribbers (16:47.649)
How would you find out this data? How would you know what kind of guest avatar to focus on and how much you can charge for the different guest avatars?

Jordan (16:56.534)
Yeah, so one way is to kind of look at the guests that come through you and the reviews they leave. I know there's some different tools that allow you to collect web addresses, email addresses, and stuff for like check-in or to connect to the internet. So that's a good way to do it. You can also ask them to fill out short surveys sometimes, and that will help. But most of the time, honestly, I just try to put myself in the shoes of a traveler. And I think people don't do that quite enough.

is all of us travel or want to travel and have experience doing some sort of travel. And so if you put yourself in those shoes, most things start to make sense. And you're like, okay, this is what I would want or this is what I would do if I was going with my significant other. And so just kind of going through that journey yourself is really gonna help you figure out what's missing or what's in a strong suit.

Jasper Ribbers (17:35.536)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jasper Ribbers (17:48.7)
Right. Yeah, I think I have a good example of that actually, because in our market in Idylwild, what I noticed is we have a studio unit that's very kind of romantic, and that thing just crushes compared to all the units in the market. And I thought it was very interesting until it was my wife's birthday and I was looking for a place to stay. And then I found this really romantic place that…

Jordan (18:03.128)
Like not.

Jasper Ribbers (18:14.604)
I was thinking, oh, my wife's gonna love that, you know? And I realized like, wow, I'm a lot less price sensitive right now than if I would book something for me and my buddies. You know what I'm saying? Like if I'm booking something with me and my buddies, it's like, all right, let's see, what's a good affordable place to stay? We just need a couch and a PlayStation, you know? Doesn't really matter. All right, and this time, you know, for my wife, it's like, oh, if she's gonna love it, like I'd happy to spend like another, you know, two, three, $400 for the weekend,

Jordan (18:21.63)
Mm-hmm. Yup.

Jasper Ribbers (18:43.332)
Yeah, that's so important, right?

Jordan (18:43.95)
No, I agree. You have to think different people are price sensitive at different times too. So your example is good kind of based on the group. Another way is based on like how early you're booking in advance and how close you are. So people kind of had this mental accounting where, if I'm looking for ski season now, I kind of see it as an investment. And then by the time ski season rolls around, I don't think of that as a cost of the trip because I already paid for it. So I spend more. So you have like lots of things like that.

And I think, I think, wives are kind of the secret weapon for anybody that does any business here in vacation rentals. I know before when I was at our portfolio, it was the same sort of deal. We had a flagship location. You know, all of the walls were glass in the middle of downtown. It was beautiful. I was like, let's take my wife there. And I had her do the normal arrival process and found out it was horrible. Right. Got all the feedback on how horrible the arrival was. So I think, you know, if you do vacation rentals, you got to have.

Have your wife go through your unit and give you the feedback.

Jasper Ribbers (19:45.68)
That's a good tip right there. You know, one thing that I've been playing around with a lot is like the OTA promotions, right? Let's just take Airbnb's example because Airbnb has a lot of them, right? There's like the last minute promotion, the length of stay, the early bird, the custom promotions, right?

And that gives you, some of those give you special marketing benefits, right? You get like a call out strike through extra line item on the price breakdown. How important is it to use those promotions versus, uh, just, just using the pricing tool.

Jordan (20:26.082)
So I think the biggest difference is if it has a benefit that's specifically about visibility. Because a lot of the way the ranking and visibility kind of algorithms work is they look at pricing and they look at value for your unit, but they don't necessarily care if it comes in the form of a discount or a base price. They're just trying to give a good product to the traveler. But what's different is if you make a change in wheelhouse or price labs and you drop your rate, that's not gonna give you

you know, any sort of visibility on like a campaign or a newsletter or their special page. And so I tend to focus more on things that give you visibility on the OTAs. It controlled most of my actual pricing kind of in dynamic pricing tools. And then usually I try to keep some sort of slash through. It's just it's just optics. People love slash throughs. I usually have it built in as just like a flat percentage that's applied to all units. So I usually try to keep a slash through.

Jasper Ribbers (21:26.752)
Right. So if you just set up your base prices a little higher than you normally would, and then you add a manual 10% discount on the entire year, will that get Airbnb and VRBL to do the slash through on the pricing?

Jordan (21:40.846)
So that will give you a slash through. And so that's like how a lot of the base prices I ended up setting is just a slightly higher to get the slash through. The one thing it doesn't do though is when they calculate value. So it's based on your posted rates and bookings for a certain period of time, usually you're three-ish months, give or take, right? And so if you always have that slash through and it's always cheaper, then that doesn't really register as a 10% discount.

It'll still show as a slash through, but it's not really showing as a value add. So you have to be wary of that too. If you use the same tricks over and over again, they're just, they're not gonna be as effective.

Jasper Ribbers (22:18.693)
Yeah, that makes sense. What are some strategies when it comes to the minimum night stay, right? That's an important thing to get right. You don't want to be too restrictive, but at the same time, you also don't want somebody to book a one night stay on a Saturday night for your top week in the summer, right? How do you determine what the optimal length of stay is, especially for high demand months?

Jordan (22:46.274)
So I usually try to be as least restrictive as possible, if that makes sense, just because you can kind of look at the searches that happen. And for each additional day you set as a minimum, that's X% of business or people that you're cutting out that's not gonna see your property. So I try to lean more towards less restrictive. And I focus especially on dates you wouldn't want to be split up. So sometimes that's a minimum length of stay.

Sometimes that's closing something to departure or arrival, right? So that they can't depart on a Saturday or something. And usually those are things like weekends or like events where people are going to stay the whole week or it's like a four day festival or just things that you don't want to split up. Other than that, I usually try to keep minimum length to stay low and just fill in my gaps as we get closer.

Jasper Ribbers (23:36.436)
Yeah. I thought it was interesting where we're on the, because I do the same thing, you know, I don't, I don't like to set it, for example, like seven night minimum stays, like one of my clients portfolios, that's a lot of people do that because they want in the summer, they want people to book an entire week. And, you know, we have like, depending on which unit and you know, when exactly we have like either a three, four, maybe a five, depending on the size of the home as well.

Jordan (23:50.848)
Mm-hmm.

Jasper Ribbers (24:02.028)
But we're still getting a lot of weak bookings and somebody on the panel that we're on today mentioned that as well, that just because you have a four night minimum stay, it doesn't mean that people aren't going to book the seven nights stay, right? But it works the other way around well.

Jordan (24:11.498)
And you can encourage them. You can encourage them to do so. So not only with a weekly discount, but if you set a two-night minimum, for instance, on the weekend so you don't split that up, and those are your higher prices because that's the high demand days, you can go in and set cheaper prices on weekdays because it's not as likely to sell. But what happens is if I want to stay a week and I search for a week, then I'm seeing the average price of the weekend and the weekdays. Right?

And so getting aggressive on your weekdays without affecting your minimum length of stays can still help you drive those longer stays as well.

Jasper Ribbers (24:49.78)
Yeah, got it. You know, one thing I've been telling all of our students is to schedule a time every single day in their calendar to focus on revenue management. I'm because what I, what I see is that a lot, you know, in the short term rental business, like there's always something coming up, right? There's guests, there's cleaners, there's maintenance, there's, there's always something to do and there's always things popping up. And oftentimes.

Jordan (25:10.99)
Hehehe

Jasper Ribbers (25:14.572)
you know, especially if, if revenue management looking at the pricing tool and it's not your most favorite thing to do, it gets pushed off and it's like, okay, well, I need to focus on the cleaning now, or I need to talk to this guest, like, you know, I'll look at the pricing tomorrow, right? And so I'm trying to get all of our students to schedule time in your calendar every Monday to Friday, or maybe in every, I mean, I look at it every day because, because I love it. I get up in the morning.

Jordan (25:26.466)
Mm-hmm.

Jordan (25:38.387)
I do too.

Jasper Ribbers (25:41.148)
I get up on Sunday and the first thing I do is like, I open all the price apps and look at all the bookings because it's exciting to me. But if it doesn't, like at least, you know, put a time in your calendar and where you can focus on it. Like how much time do you think an average host with like 10 listings should spend on a daily basis?

Jordan (26:01.002)
If you have 10 listings, you can probably get away with 10 or 15 minutes on a daily basis honestly. A lot of the work comes up front, right? And you're setting your strategy and getting your settings there. And after that, you're kind of just monitoring or adjusting to new market conditions or info. The biggest thing if you have a small portfolio is just that you can only sell every day once and once it's sold, it's gone. And there's lots of variability, right? So if you book…

one week in one unit, that's 25% of your month that's just got booked and that's a big change for you. So usually what I do is like every morning, I'll just do a quick once over of the calendar, nothing fancy, not even tons of data. I'm just looking to see if anything looks weird, stands out, key changes. And then from there, I'll kind of get back into my normal job, but kind of just wanting to, you know, keep a pulse on it and see if there's anything really that's changed overnight.

Jasper Ribbers (26:56.776)
Right. And then are there things like that we should be looking at, like maybe on a weekly or like a monthly basis?

Jordan (27:03.03)
Yeah, so I usually try to set different look ahead periods at different frequencies. So I'm usually looking at the next couple of days and the next couple of weeks, you know, pretty much daily since I do this professionally. But then when you start talking about like, you know, I look at a month at least once a week, probably twice a week. I'm looking out 90 days at least once a week. You know, at the end of every month, we have some things we do where we're going through and we're checking, you know, far out dates, new dates that we're opening.

We're doing compression event reporting and adjustments. And so you just kind of start setting up the cadence because you don't have to check everything every day, especially if you have a pricing tool, but you have to stay on top of it. So just a calendar helps.

Jasper Ribbers (27:49.408)
Mm-hmm. So one thing I've learned over the last few years that's really important is pacing, right? And I think not everybody understands what that means. Can you explain the concept of pacing?

Jordan (28:00.158)
Yeah, so pacing is just, you're comparing how fast you're filling up your calendar or your occupancy to something else. It could be the market, it could be you're saying unit or portfolio last year, but you're just comparing kind of that rate of change. And you can think about it as, you know, you could kind of play a game where both you and I want to fill up a bucket of water in five minutes and we both get a hose, right? We're gonna sit there and watch the bucket and see how fast is

Should I slow it down? Should I speed it up? And that's essentially what you're doing when you're doing it with free or vacation rental is you're watching how many bookings are coming in. If it's filling too fast, you kind of raise the rate and slow down the trickle, slow down the bookings. And if it's going too slow, you provide a discount. And so that's essentially all it is, is you're just trying to pace how quickly you fill out your calendar.

Jasper Ribbers (28:53.14)
Right. Yeah. Cause one thing I noticed is because the winter was a bit slow. Some of the people I work with are a bit concerned about the year. Right. And so they're telling me like, Hey, we should, we should be aggressive at the rates because like, I want to get booked up in advance because I'm worried that your competition can be low, you know? And then I look at the pacing. I'm like, well, but you know, I'm seeing like the markets like

Jordan (29:04.584)
Mm-hmm.

Jordan (29:19.948)
Thank you.

Jasper Ribbers (29:20.076)
You know, pacing ahead. So we should maybe raise the prices. Right. So it's, you know, it's, I think it's really important to look at that and that data is available in most, most pricing tools, right? You can, you can see like how much of the market is booked up already for the summer, for example. Um, so is that something that you look at on a daily or a weekly, a monthly basis? Like how far is the market pacing ahead or behind?

Jordan (29:44.654)
I'd say we probably look at that almost daily. We have quite a few custom data views that we make, where we just get the visualizations we like. And so we're always kind of looking at price positioning and pacing side by side to kind of get a story of what's happening. I think it's important, kind of like what you said, is you can compare yourself to market. It also gets interesting if you compare yourself to market to yourself to market before. So, where was I last year? Where was the market last year? And then how's that stack up now?

And then when you start getting more experienced or more professional or applying more levers, that's when you start thinking, okay, I have more bedrooms, I should be booking out earlier. The market changed because this is a new attraction, so I would expect this to happen. That's when the nuances come in. But really, it's just you have to make that comparison and know where you stand.

Jasper Ribbers (30:39.018)
Mm-hmm. Got it. What are some practical tips they have for people that are listening right now? Like if people want to improve their revenue management and if they want to increase their income, what are some practical things they could do right now?

Jordan (30:51.562)
Yes. Oh, so I think there's a few easy tips to follow. And I say a lot of people just randomly change prices and hope it works. But not all prices have the same effect. And so making prices changes that matter is what's going to have an impact. So charm pricing, right? So ending in fours and nines. It's really weird, but it works. It's kind of like if you go to a

a conference or a motivational speaker and they ask how you're doing, then they ask it again and everybody's louder. It's like, it shouldn't work, but it works every time. Every time someone gets louder. It's the same with nines and fours. I also like to think of like price bands is what I call them. And so they're just kind of natural numbers that people think in. It's like $100, $150, $250. And those are just ways that people kind of budget themselves, but it's also what people will plug into filters.

And so going from $101 to $99 is going to have a huge effect because it's going to push you in that filter underneath $100. But if you go from $103 to $101, you're probably not moving the needle much. And so I would say, practical things is you can make really small adjustments that have a big impact that just make common sense.

Jasper Ribbers (32:10.9)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's a good one. Why is the four such a psychological number? I understand the nine, but why is the four such a psychological number?

Jordan (32:17.258)
Because the base 10 system and fives half of it so people think in tens and fives and so four is kind of You know just below five My price other things that were more expensive, right? We had lots of different rules like so you would slowly take out more and more numbers the bigger the price was So you start by taking out like sixes and eights The next thing you know, you're getting rid of twos threes sevens, and then you only got four or nine left

But those are just kind of the most round numbers that people like.

Jasper Ribbers (32:49.42)
Yeah, OK, makes sense. Awesome, man. Well, appreciate you jumping on here and sharing some knowledge. Why don't you let everybody know how they can contact you if they're interested in learning more about what you have to offer.

Jordan (33:01.75)
Yeah, for sure. So you can always find me on LinkedIn or our company's website is www. There you can see all of our services, blogs, links to other sorts of webinars and resources. Try to put as much information up there as possible. You can always reach out by email, jordan at revp or fill out a contact form. We're pretty good at getting back to people and even if our services aren't for you.

We'll still try to help you and push you in the right direction.

Jasper Ribbers (33:35.744)
Awesome. Well, thanks Jordan. It's been great having you on. I'm sure you'll see you at the next revenue management panel or conference. It's a small world, the world of revenue managers.

Jordan (33:45.39)
There's only so many of us, so I'll probably be there. Bye-bye.

Jasper Ribbers (33:50.58)
Awesome, man. I appreciate you jumping on and to the listeners, hope you enjoyed this episode. We'll be back soon with another one. Until then.

Jordan (33:56.345)
Thanks.

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