Growing a profitable Airbnb requires standing out in a competitive market. One of the best ways to do this is through Airbnb competitor analysis.
By examining what other successful hosts in your area are doing, you can uncover key strategies to enhance your own listing, attract more bookings, and maximize revenue.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through six steps to perform an Airbnb competitor analysis and show you how to apply these insights to optimize your pricing, search rankings, and conversion rates.
Whether you’re a seasoned host or just starting out, this comprehensive approach will give you the edge you need to outperform the competition. Let’s dive in!
What is an Airbnb Competitor Analysis?
Airbnb competitor analysis is the process of identifying and studying other short-term rental listings in your area to understand their strengths, weaknesses, and performance.
The goal is to use this data to improve your own listing through:
- Pricing Optimization: By analyzing the pricing strategies of similar listings, you can adjust your rates to remain competitive. Understanding peak and off-season pricing trends ensures your listing is priced appropriately to maximize revenue. Using an Airbnb pricing tool makes this even easier.
- Airbnb Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Competitor analysis helps identify what high-performing listings are doing differently—such as their descriptions, titles, amenity offerings, and photos. Applying similar strategies can help improve your rankings in Airbnb search results.
- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): Offering the features and amenities guests value can improve your booking conversion rate.
The key here is to find competitors who are similar enough to your own listing to glean useful insights. Looking at competitor listings with different room counts or entirely different amenities won’t be as useful as finding listings that are more similar to your own.
So let’s look at how to do that!
5 Steps to Perform an Airbnb Competitor Analysis
These are the five steps to perform an Airbnb competitor analysis:
- Identify the RIGHT competitors
- Analyze their listings to see what’s working
- Adjust your pricing strategy
- Optimize your listing based on your findings
- Monitor the results & tweak as needed
Let’s go through each step using this listing as an example.
Step 1: Identify Your ACTUAL Competitors
You can’t just go on Airbnb in your area and start looking at listings. If you have a 4-bedroom 2-bathroom home, you’re not really competing with studio apartments or tiny backyard ADUs.
Instead, try to filter your search for homes that have similar:
- Guest capacities
- Beds & baths
- Amenities
- Location
- Square footage
For example, if you have a 2-bedroom, 1-bath home near a river, look for similar homes with river access. It’s not always possible to find extremely similar competitors, especially if you’re in a rural location or have a unique home, but try to get as close as possible.
Use Airbnb’s filters to find similar rentals:
It can take a long time to find the right competitors. Lucky for you, Rankbreeze can do it for you automatically for just $1. Sign up for the trial, add your listing, and let our software work its magic:
Step 2: Analyze Competitor Listings
Once you have a list of at least 5-10 similar competing properties, it’s time to run your analysis.
Create a spreadsheet and gather the following data for each listing:
- Title
- Price
- Photos
- Description
- Guest reviews
- Amenities
If this sounds like a tedious process—it is. But the more time you spend pouring over these details, the more insights you’ll gather into what makes your competitors’ listings successful!
When analyzing this data, look for trends. Are there a lot of competitors priced lower than you? A lower price may help a lot. Do most of your competitors have a hot tub? It might be time to add your own.
Most of this analysis can be done automatically with Rankbreeze. We analyze your competitors and tell you exactly what they’re doing differently, including amenities:
The most useful data (that’s often overlooked) is guest reviews. It’s a great idea to analyze competitors’ reviews to see what guests like or dislike about their experience. You can analyze customer reviews pretty easily with ChatGPT.
Just copy the reviews and paste them into ChatGPT, with a prompt like “Analyze the following reviews and tell me what customers like and dislike about this Airbnb property.”
Use ChatGPT’s analysis to guide your own optimizations. Add things guests wished were included, and highlight things in your property that guests love.
Step 3: Adjust Your Pricing Strategy
The first thing you’ll notice is trends in competitors' pricing strategies. Don’t just look at their base price—you should also factor in things like cleaning fees and any other additional charges.
Rankbreeze automatically displays competitor’s pricing so you don’t have to check each one manually. It even shows you price changes over time, seasonality, and more.
Adjust your prices to better match your competitors. That said, keep your pricing profitable and don’t forget to reflect your own amenities. If your competitors are cheaper, but you have major amenities that they are lacking (like a pool, hot tub, or game room), it’s OK to price a bit higher.
Consider using dynamic pricing strategies rather than manually updating your prices. Not only does this save you a ton of time, it also allows you to charge more for high-demand days like weekends or holidays.
Rankbreeze has a built-in Airbnb pricing tool that allows you to set prices on autopilot as part of your subscription.
Step 4: Optimize Your Listing for Airbnb Search & Conversions
Airbnb search engine optimization (SEO) is important for getting your listing to show up higher when guests search for rentals in your city. Pricing is a part of that, but Airbnb also factors in things like:
- Amenities
- Title & description
- Photo captions
- Guest reviews
- And over 20 other ranking factors
To optimize your listing to show up higher in search results, you should make sure you offer the most popular amenities in your city, are priced competitively, and have an enticing and well-formatted description.
We ran a study across several thousand Airbnbs and found that descriptions less than 5,127 characters that were edited to meet or exceed that length got a boost in visibility:.
You could perform your Airbnb competitor analysis manually and get an idea of all these things, but it’s going to be much easier with a $1 trial of Rankbreeze. We offer optimization features like:
- An amenities analyzer to automatically see which amenities your competitors are offering that you’re not so you can easily add the most important ones.
- A competitor pricing analyzer to see how your competitors are pricing their listings, along with recommended pricing for your own listing.
- An optimization hub that shows you the keywords you should include in your title and description.
- A market research tool that gives you all the data you need about your competitor’s listings, including estimates of how much profit they’re making, occupancy rates, and more.
Need inspiration? Here are a few examples of listings that rank well in search results:
- Pink Pickle Girl’s House in Austin, TX
- Bay Park Beauty in San Diego, CA
- New Residential Oasis in Scottsdale, AZ
These listings have great photos, excellent description copy, and solid customer reviews—all things you should strive for to beat the Airbnb algorithm.
Step 5: Monitor and Adjust Regularly
Once your listing is live, you can see key metrics like booking rates, impressions, and more by opting into Airbnb’s professional hosting tools and navigating to their performance dashboard:
This is great for keeping tabs on how your listing is performing, and they have suggested “Opportunities” you can complete to improve your listing.
Unfortunately, you can’t just set up your listing once and forget about it. If you want to be successful as an Airbnb host, you need to continue to tweak, optimize, and test changes to your listing.
But how do you know what to change?
The key is A/B testing. A/B testing means testing two versions of a page against one another — version “A” and version “B”.
To do this in Airbnb, you need software like Rankbreeze that allows you to monitor the results of changes you make to your listing. You change one thing on your listing — like your title, description, photos, or pricing — and click “Track a Change” in the A/B testing section:
This will let you see changes to your Airbnb search rankings over time. As you make changes to your listing slowly over weeks and months, you’ll begin to recognize what has the biggest impact on your rankings (and bookings).
The key is to only change one thing at a time. If you change more than one thing, you won’t know which change actually affected your listing.
Key Metrics to Track During Competitor Analysis
Effective competitor analysis for Airbnb hosts requires tracking specific metrics to uncover actionable insights and stay ahead in the market.
Here are some metrics to pay attention to:
1. Nightly Pricing Trends
Competitor pricing strategies can significantly influence your own success. Keeping tabs on how others adjust their nightly rates helps you stay competitive without undervaluing your listing.
How to track with Rankbreeze: Head over to the Competitor Rates section to see your competitor's exact prices and how they change depending on the day of the week.
2. Rankings
The higher your rank on Airbnb’s search results in your city, the more potential guests will see your listing and book it. It’s important to work on optimizing your listing for search and conversions.
How to track with Rankbreeze: Track rankings for your listing in the Property Search Rankings section. You’ll see different colored bars that represent searches for different guest counts. For example, this chart shows yellow as five guests, orange as six guests, etc.. Hover over it for the exact position.
3. Guest Review Sentiment Analysis
Understanding guest feedback about competitors can highlight gaps in the market and opportunities to improve your own offering.
Here’s a guide on how to do this with ChatGPT.
Perform Your Airbnb Competitor Analysis Today For Just $1
Rankbreeze is one of the best Airbnb tools for hosts to make more money. Ready to analyze your competitors and get useful insights into how to improve your Airbnb listing?
Click here to get a $1 trial of Rankbreeze and see your competitor’s pricing strategy, amenities, reviews, and much more.