"It's data, it's science, but it's also art. A little bit of instinct, a little bit of gut."
— Brock, 170-listing operator
That's not a hobby host talking. That's someone managing 170 properties, millions in annual revenue, telling me that pricing still comes down to feel.
And he's not wrong. He's describing reality. The question is whether that reality is something to accept or something to fix.
The vacation rental industry has romanticized gut-feel pricing. "Know your market" is the advice. "Trust your instincts." Experienced operators say it with pride, like it's a badge of competence. And it is, in a way. If you've been in a market for ten years, your instincts carry a decade of pattern recognition. You can feel when demand is shifting before the data confirms it.
But here's what nobody says out loud: gut instinct is a workaround, not a strategy. It exists because the actual signal doesn't.
Three tiers of the same problem
At the bottom, you have operators who set a price and leave it. $200/night, all year, maybe a small bump for holidays. One host on Reddit described their approach: "I just set my price at $80 per night, and let smart pricing raise it when there is unusual demand." That's not pricing. That's hoping.
In the middle, you have operators who subscribe to a dynamic pricing tool. PriceLabs, Wheelhouse, Beyond. They connect their PMS, flip every feature to "on," and assume they're now practicing revenue management. As one industry observer noted, they've often just created chaos. The tool adjusts rates based on comps and seasonality, but the operator has no idea why a specific rate was set on a specific night.
"Was it the tool or the weather? How much of that 8% is your tool?"
— Brock, on attribution
Nobody could answer him. Not one vendor.
At the top, you have the operators Brock describes. The ones who use the tool as a baseline but overlay their own judgment. They know their market, they watch the calendar, they adjust manually when something feels off. They're good at this. Some of them are very good.
But even the best ones are missing something.
The black box problem
The vacation rental industry has spent the last five years building tools designed to remove the operator from the equation. That's the pitch. "You don't need to think about pricing anymore. We handle it."
And it sounds appealing. Pricing is complex. It's time-consuming. Most operators don't have revenue management backgrounds. So the promise of automation makes sense. Just connect your PMS, flip every feature to "on," and let the system run.
"I don't want to put my property into a black box and just trust it's going to give me the right answer."
— Brock
That's not resistance to technology. That's a reasonable demand for transparency from someone whose livelihood depends on getting this right.
Operators who care about their business, the ones running 10, 50, 200 properties, they need to know if the tool is actually working or just running while the market moves. They need to see the reasoning. Not because they want to micromanage the algorithm, but because they want to know when to override it. Because sometimes the algorithm is wrong. Sometimes there's a local event it doesn't know about. Sometimes the property just had a renovation and the comps are no longer comps. Sometimes gut instinct, built over years of operating in that market, is more accurate than any model.
Operators don't want to be removed from the equation. They want to be informed within it.
There's a difference between "we'll handle your pricing" and "here's what we see, here's why we recommend this rate, and here's what happens if you go higher or lower." The first one asks for blind trust. The second one builds earned trust. Almost every tool on the market chose the first approach.
The missing input
Every pricing tool in the market works from the same data. Historical rates. Competitor rates. Occupancy trends. Seasonality. Local events. Some add weather. Some add flight search data. The sophisticated ones use machine learning to weigh these inputs.
What none of them use is the one signal that would actually change the equation: who is looking at your property right now, and what are they willing to pay?
Every pricing tool starts at the rate and works backwards. Nobody starts at the person.
Think about what that means. Every rate recommendation you've ever received was based on what happened in the past, what competitors are doing now, and what statistical models predict about the future. It's an educated guess. A very good educated guess, in some cases. But it has zero information about the actual humans who are visiting your listing today.
A family reunion of twelve who have been planning this trip for six months and will pay whatever you charge are getting the same rate as a solo traveler price-shopping between four listings. The couple who searched for your area four times this week, compared you to two competitors, and are about to book, they're seeing a rate that was set for a hypothetical average guest.
That's not dynamic pricing. That's static pricing with a dynamic label.
Why gut instinct persists
Operators rely on instinct because the tools haven't earned full trust. And the tools haven't earned full trust because they can't show their work in terms operators understand.
The best operators use tools to sharpen their instinct, not replace it. But you can't sharpen instinct against a black box. You need to see what the box sees. The operators who push back on blind automation aren't being difficult. They're being smart. They're the ones who know their market better than any dataset. They just need the data to confirm or challenge what they already suspect.
The supply side of pricing has been mapped extensively. What your competitors charge, what the market averages look like, what historical patterns suggest. That data is abundant, accessible, and well-served by existing tools.
The demand side is a blank page. And on a blank page, gut instinct is the only pen that works.