Fractional Usage: Length of Stay Prices

[lucadgtrip]

Monthly Prices in the home sharing vertical: I think it's important to consider developing them as early as possible in the process. In this was we could tap an undeserved and growing market of long stays (driven by the raise of remote working, digital nomads and generally more flexible lifestyles around the world). If you need some data to support the claim, I'll be happy to share. See also https://www.airbnb.com/sublets which is basically a mini site dedicated to this market (not a niche, but a whole different market in my opinion).

Probably the best way it to replicate Airbnb's approach. It gives two ways to set monthly prices (28 days or longer) A) discount on nightly rates: a percentage applied to all months. B) price per specific month: price for January, February and so on. It overrides A in case both are set.

Price per specific month (B) gives much more control, as with percent (A) the moment I change the nightly price the monthly price changes too. With B I am able to dedicate some months to tourists and others to longer stays.

In case developing both at this stage is hard we'd need to discuss which one is better. In my opinion (B) is more effective

WEEKLY PRICES Similarly Airbnb allows to set a discount for a week or for each specific week but I am not sure the specific week is useful as it never corresponds to specific seasons. Anyway there may be some use case (maybe even major ones) for which it's useful. I am just not aware of them.

@jordajm

[micahalcorn]

Great, thanks @lucadgtrip for the thorough request and screenshots. 👌

[jordajm]

Yeah, thank you @lucadgtrip From a technical point of view, I don't think this would be overly difficult since we've already done similar work on the calendar components and since origin-js and our contracts already support a similar use case for nightly bookings.

We'd probably create a new UI component (or maybe two - one for buyer's view and one for seller's view) like the monthly price widget in the screenshot and make the components generate a slots array for a listing/offer just like the calendar component does.

@lucadgtrip - what does the monthly booking component on Airbnb look like from the buyer's point of view?

[lucadgtrip]

@jordajm when monthly prices are set as here https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/11253605?check_in=2019-03-01&guests=1&adults=1&check_out=2019-03-31 it does now show a discount

When they discount is set, as here https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/146821?check_in=2019-01-07&guests=1&adults=1&check_out=2019-02-06 it shows the discount

unrelated but interesting: as you can see Airbnb fees for the guest are really high, which makes it much more interesting to go through the dapp, rather than in Airbnb. In fact they tend to google for the listing and try to go direct. For a couple of nights stay, it's harder to incentivize the guest to do the extra effort. So, this market may be an easier one to serve in the "dapps are hard" era.

[lucadgtrip]

one side note: Airbnb considers monthly rentals anything of 28 or more days. Not sure why, maybe to cover for February too. If we consider 30 days and have a field "February" where I insert the monthly prices it wouldn't apply unless we consider monthly rentals anything of 28 or more days.