How a Swiss property management company scaled their business with Wheelhouse Pricing
What started as a school project for two enterprising Swiss students has snowballed into a fully-fledged travel venture.
In early 2017, Nicolas Montagner saw a massive opportunity in Europe. He wanted to offer new vacation rental solutions to customers that desired to travel and discover the Alps. Montagner was earning his bachelors at the innovative HES-SO Valais-Wallis when he began reaching out to Swiss property owners to gauge their interest. Andreas Fischer later joined Montagner to provide assistance on the technology side and Coucou&Co was founded soon thereafter at the end of 2017.
As Coucou&Co began growing their inventory, they had two main objectives: (1) find a property management software to scale their operations and (2) find a pricing tool to automate their overall pricing strategy by city and by peak season.
THE OPPORTUNITY
After discovering BookingSync as the right property management system for their growing operation, finding a pricing software became a must-have for the Coucou&Co team. “Cities are different pricing-wise on a seasonal basis”, explained Fischer, now the company CTO, “so it was not an efficient way to manage pricing on our listings.” Going listing-by-listing proved to be incredibly time-consuming.
Pricing management is particularly important to maximize revenue in a vacation market like the Swiss Alps where prices are very dependent on seasonal changes. Ski weather in Switzerland is typically peak season but can be highly unpredictable based on location. Coucou&Co’s listings were located in numerous Swiss cities and regions so the seasons were all slightly different and thus difficult to optimize and scale manually. Managing all the various markets manually within Airbnb proved to be a challenging task.
THE ANSWER
“We tested all the major pricing services. Prices aligned perfectly with our expectations with Wheelhouse.”
Montagner and Fischer chose Wheelhouse to simplify all these issues. They started with a listing that they had deep knowledge of and tested it with all the major pricing services. Wheelhouse stood out for one reason: the localized pricing aligned perfectly with their predictions. “The trust part was critical. Wheelhouse gave us the right pricing.”
Wheelhouse provides automated pricing management at scale for the various markets Coucou&Co cared about, allowing them to cycle through their listings and see the latest up-to-date recommendations. They could also filter by local markets and neighborhoods to make it easier to track and manage their growing portfolio.
Wheelhouse solved many of the problems Coucou&Co previously faced in manually pricing dozens of listings for multiple Swiss ski markets. Using standard Wheelhouse settings like base price (to set a standard for pricing expectations across the calendar) and seasonality adjustments (to adjust pricing recommendations on a month-by-month basis) allowed them to adapt to high season and low season for every specific market.
With Wheelhouse, the growing chalet management company can now stay ahead of intensive demand periods and manage multiple markets in numerous locations with various market nuances, ultimately allowing Coucou&Co to maximize their revenue.
THE OUTCOME
“Wheelhouse took us from hours to minutes in managing our pricing.”
Coucou&Co started with 10 listings on Wheelhouse less than eight months ago. Today, they have tripled that inventory and are poised to add even more listings in the near future thanks to streamlining their pricing and guest experience. And the process has only gotten easier.
“Wheelhouse does much of the work for us,” Fischer adds. “It used to take hours to make sure everything was right. With Wheelhouse, it only takes five to ten minutes to set up each listing with the pricing we need. We reduced the time it took to set prices by at least 80%.”
Interested in being involved in a Wheelhouse case study? Contact us at hello@usewheelhouse.com! We’d love to hear your story.
If this story inspires you, click here to sign up for a 30-day free trial with Wheelhouse. Use the referral code provided to get an additional $1000 in free bookings after the trial ends!
