I’m Thomas and I grew up in Toronto, Canada. I used to be a real-estate broker, looking after other people’s properties, but I realised that there was a really lucrative opportunity in the short-term-rental market, and I decided to give it a try. Since 2011 I have been investing in Condos in Toronto and then furnishing them and letting them out to visitors to Toronto on a short-term basis.

At the time, AirBnB was the main channel, but I wanted to go beyond this and I needed a PMS and a channel manager to achieve this. In 2011, I built a tool to synchronise my calendar with the Online Travel Agents, and people asked me if they could use it too. I realised that there was a gap in the market for software for short-term-rental operators and BookingAutomation was born. By 2019 we had reached 15,000 properties.

Sometimes I had no time and I knew I was leaving money on the table.
To price my apartments, I was doing the whole process manually. I was good at it, but it needed constant adjustment. Sometimes I had no time and I knew I was leaving money on the table. You don’t wake up in the morning and say “I want to tweak my prices!”.

I heard about RoomPriceGenie from a client and wanted to try it out. I also spoke to RoomPriceGenie about getting an integration with Booking Automation and they delivered it.

All the things you would normally do manually are automated

I created the rules I wanted within RoomPriceGenie and could immediately see the benefit. The prices were moving about with my occupancy and the properties around me. All the things you would normally do manually are automated. And other outside events that I wouldn’t have noticed, are all taken care of.

Pricing has been on-point

From then, I have more-or-less let it run without touching it. In general pricing has been on-point. It has saved a lot of time and allowed me to focus on my main business. The financial results were also noticeably better, because it was more consistent with pricing than I was.

The one time I did have to change settings was after Corona hit, but then after that I haven’t touched it again since.

Because I have multiple units it is simple to tell if it is doing a good job – I just see if I am selling the right number of units each night. And the answer is yes!

Would I recommend it to short-term-rental owners?

I would recommend this to all short-term rental owners with multiple units. The value given by RoomPriceGenie is very good because of the revenue it brings. Overall I feel very confident and comfortable with the pricing. RoomPriceGenie gives me the benefit of selling all my units.