In the airlines, a VP once told me “you can only be as good as your dumbest competitor” — if a rival drops prices, you’re forced to match, because economy seats are nearly identical and there are only a few players. Staying uncompetitive only works when demand exceeds supply.
Short-term rentals are different
A flight’s choice set is 1 to 3 options; a rental market can have thousands, of wildly varying quality. That’s made it genuinely hard to know who your real competitors are. Quibble’s new comp set is based on search results — only the competitors that show up in the same search as the property being priced, a refined set of just 10–20 listings that mirrors how consumers actually shop.
Why the industry went broad
The forecast/optimization models hotels and airlines use can run on historical booking data alone, but that data is too sparse for a single STR property. So the industry adopted base-price models, which are 100% dependent on competitive pricing data and track big groups of competitors’ future rates. Use a small comp set of 10 there and the model goes off the rails — which is why the standard answer became hundreds or thousands of properties: reliable and easy to manage, but lacking specificity because it just tracks the broad market.
How humans actually shop
Someone ready to book isn’t weighing 1,000 or even 100 properties — they’ve narrowed it to about 10. Those are the only comps that matter, because they’re the listings the shopper might book instead of yours. Quibble’s model optimizes expected revenue against exactly that set.
How search-based comp sets work
To find the set, Quibble simulates a series of searches, leveraging the OTA display algorithm that shapes the real choice set. It starts with the broad city, zooms into the specific area, then filters on quality and price — and takes the first-page results with high confidence that these are the real comps. The old models weren’t helping managers compete because they treated everyone as a competitor regardless of quality or price; search-based comp sets fix that.