I visit Georgetown regularly to visit my elderly parents. It is always a choice between a hotel and an Airbnb, depending on the length of the visit. The quality of the Airbnb has gone downhill over the years, which is surprising, given the large number of facilities that are available. (You'd think competitive pressure would raise standards and not lower them).

I understand that quite a few posters on Texags have places they rent, and my question for you is, "how do you determine the pricing for your unit?". The prices have gone up to the point that suite hotels have become competitive, and I see so many empty Airbnb available that I just can't understand why they wouldn't reduce prices a bit to attract more business. Surely owners have to be doing some analysis on optimum pricing to maximize revenue for their units, right?

Pricing pressures drive quality. As prices goes down so does quality. True for many products and services.
Airlines are a good example.

Slightly reducing the rates is a smart and common sense approach to help get bookings if times are slow. However greatly reducing the price oftentimes attracts a different clientele. Damage to property, uncleanliness and not following house rules in general are what usually follows if you heavily reduce the price.

Owners would rather lose out on a booking than dealing with those situations.

My family have been operating STRs (Short Term Rentals) since 2017. Way more work than we ever thought but also more profitable than we imagined.

If I'm traveling alone, hotel definitely. And I don't have to follow cleaning instructions etc. With hotels, bed and pillow qualities are predictable. With airbnb, I may get a waterbed from 70s.

And the cleaning fee... WTF.

Now, golf outing with a group of guys to split the cost, airbnb makes sense.

No different than anything else... we looked at other units in our market with similar amenities, location, size, and quality, and priced similar/slightly below them.

We've also started tinkering with incentives (i.e. offer a gift certificate to a local restaurant for multi night stays, half priced nights for return visitors, etc.) and we are doing very well with our unit.

We tinker with the rates when we have vacancies. AirBnB has settings that will let your rates change by their algorithms if you let them, but we prefer to adjust on our own.

But as someone said before, go too low and you get bad guests. We have a floor we won't go below. We've had very, very few problems but have friends that have had several. One friend will go as low as $50/night just to keep someone in her unit, and she's had drugs, floods, fights... we have never had any of those problems.