Easyapartments

Tell us about your property.

Easyapartments GmbH has been around for just about ten years now. We started with two vacation rentals in Salzburg’s Old Town, and today we manage 24 apartments—mostly in Salzburg, but also a few in Linz.

The majority of our business is in Salzburg, especially in our guesthouse Villa Elisa, a renovated Art Nouveau villa with twelve apartments.

We’re a classic family-run business. Most of the apartments belong to my parents, my brother, or close family friends. I’m the managing director and a partial owner.

Our guests come from all over the world—North and South America, Europe, Asia, Australia. Every year we welcome visitors from countries we’ve never had before.

Most of our bookings come through portals: Booking.com, Airbnb, Expedia, Vrbo, and FeWoDirekt. We also get some direct bookings through our website, and occasionally a few guests call us directly to book the old-fashioned way.

We’ve been using Smartpricing since November 2023.

How did you manage pricing before Smartpricing?

Before Smartpricing, managing our pricing was extremely time-consuming and manual.

We had price lists, and because we use a per-person pricing model—a base price plus an additional charge per guest—it quickly became complicated.

All our apartments have a flexible bed system, so each unit can be configured differently depending on how many guests are staying.

That meant we had to enter separate prices into our PMS for every possible occupancy, for every apartment, for every season.

If I needed to make changes—like adjusting for a specific season—I had to rewrite every single list. It was a massive amount of work, especially since Salzburg has a lot of seasonal variation.

And with inflation last year, prices had to be adjusted multiple times within the same year. There’s no way I could’ve kept up with that using the old system.

Why did you decide to go with Smartpricing?

I found out about Smartpricing at the “Alles für den Gast” trade fair in Salzburg.

I was speaking with our PMS provider, and one of their team members told me many of their customers had great experiences with Smartpricing. So I stopped by the Smartpricing booth and looked into it further.

What problem were you trying to solve?

The biggest problem was definitely the time it took to manage pricing.

As I mentioned, I used to spend hours maintaining our price lists. Any change required updating everything manually.

What results have you seen with Smartpricing?

The main difference I see is flexibility.

Now I can make small adjustments in five minutes. Before, the same thing would have taken me over an hour. I save a huge amount of time.

As for revenue, we didn’t see explosive growth, but there was a noticeable increase. I think that also depends on the current economic situation and our guest mix.

That said, I did see a clear difference during high season—especially in July and August, when the Salzburg Festival takes place.

With Smartpricing, we were able to achieve significantly higher average rates during that time.

What do you like most about Smartpricing?

What I like most is the dashboard. You can see, at a glance, how a price change impacts things visually.

I find that really helpful—especially because it gives you the confidence to experiment with pricing a bit. That just wasn’t possible before, because it took too much effort.

What matters to me is having more time for other things—running the business, focusing on strategy, and taking care of our guests.

Would you go back to your old system?

No, definitely not.

We’re very satisfied and have now also connected our apartments in Linz.