SXSW - Before and After, Accommodation Price Surging
Many Airbnb hosts are aware of the importance of appropriately pricing their listing for special events. Since, Uber made the term “Surge Pricing” a common day terminology, most hosts understand that higher demand should mean higher pricing.
Here we have 2 examples of how Austin, TX’s Airbnb hosts observe an event and act accordingly.
With around 60,000 room nights booked for hotels and over 80,000 attendees for 2015’s edition, SXSW is easily one of the biggest annual event. This year, the event starts on March 10 2016.
This is how Airbnb hosts decided to price their home when SXSW is happening (Check-in date set to March 9th, 2016):
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"> <?xml encoding="UTF-8" ?>https://www.stay22.com/embed/sxsw?isairbnbonly=true&canscroll=false
And no..these are not total prices..they are per night! Meaning during the week of SXSW, the nightly rental price is around $1200 a night!
Same thing..but a week before the SXSW starts (Check-in date set to March 1st, 2016):
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"> <?xml encoding="UTF-8" ?>https://www.stay22.com/embed/sxsw?checkin=03%2F01%2F2016&checkout=03%2F04%2F2016&isairbnbonly=true&canscroll=false
Ahh..much better! We are averaging around $300 a night right now! Still expensive, but hey..this is Austin and at least it’s not a 4x increase!
So picture this: the event ticket costing around $1000, flights costing $700, accommodation costing a total of $10,000 for the whole stay..you’d end up going to an event for around $12,000
Crazy isn’t it? Well..not really..actually all these rooms you see there end up getting booked a couple weeks before the event starts. Currently, there are a couple of listings around that haven’t surged up their prices yet..mostly due to hosting inexperience on taking advantage of situations (although Airbnb hosts have access to pricing recommendation tool built by Airbnb). So if you’re planning to attend SXSW, take my tip, and book your accommodation now..who knows how much they will surge in the last few weeks before the event starts.
Before you jump the gun and start fiddling around other type of accommodation, this phenomena happens with Hotels and other apartment rental companies such as HomeAway.
At this point you’d wanna ask yourself if you rather buy a car or have a roof to sleep under during SXSW.