Interesting feature of competitor

I won't say who, but they send out a signal to the OTA for each property, that auto updates the last time the profile was updated. It makes it look like you changed it and it supposedly pushes your listing up in the rankings as being more active. They claim they do it every 15 minutes, but even daily seems to have value. If you're interested in who and how, you can contact me.

I've seen people advertising that feature, but does it actually work or does it just sound good? If it really did work it'd be trivially simple for channels to detect that kind of update spam and drop the ranking... that's why I'm not so convinced on it.

I don't know if works. Only way may be free trial of a competitor?

Is there a way for you to test the idea?

I am not live yet, so cannot tell. I am wondering if the pricing updates of priceLabs might do something like that...

I read elsewhere of owners who update their profiles frequently by hand to achieve this.

We've been told point blank by TripAdvisor and VRBO dev teams that this is no longer the case. VRBO used to have a metric for when the calendar was updated (and even a button for "calendar is updated now" that would reset it) but they stopped doing that. With API integration, it would probably not work because we could push a fake "update" every day to the channel that something changed. Nothing beats high reviews and good rates relative to time (dropped for last minute, etc). But I agree with you that some markets are crazy big and competitive. I'd hate to face the type of competition that Kissimmee has.