Background
Roadfans was founded in 2017 by passionate travellers who recognized a gap in the motorhome rental market. The founders aimed to provide an innovative, customer-friendly service by offering a seamless online booking system, flexible rental periods without minimum length of stay, and 24/7 pickup and return options. They wanted to simplify the process of renting motorhomes and enhance the travel experience for their customers.
The cooperation of Roadfans and Priceff started in September 2023 with a pilot considering dynamic pricing for the fall holiday period in Germany. Everything worked well and the companies agreed on a long-term cooperation.
Start and usage
The next step was joined planning for 2024. This work was based on a historical analysis, Roadfans’ financial targets for 2024 as well as thoughts and vision of how the pricing should work. The result was a structure and settings for dynamic pricing for the whole 2024. We defined different seasons and how the pricing should work for various motorhome types and locations.
Along the year, the settings have been adapted based on Roadfans fleet and overall development of demand. The automation handles daily price changes, and Roadfans can easily change the settings by themselves.
Results and future
“We are very happy how Priceff dynamic pricing works. Priceff automatically adapts prices on a vehicle type – location – day level based on demand compared to Roadfans’ targets. Especially the cooperation with the Priceff team is very smooth and the support with tweaking in settings is great. Priceff was able to adapt their system to Roadfans’ needs. Results look very good: Roadfans has gained more demand to desired time periods and good price levels during busy times, leading to an uplift of +13% in revenue per available camper. The system easily provides a positive ROI. We have not heard any complaints from end customers, naturally helped by the easy-to-adapt Max and Min limits where the price may move”
Commercial Director Suzanne Dorok at Roadfans outlines.
The automation enables Roadfans to focus on finetuning specific situations, e.g. in connection with timing of holidays in each German state as well as changes in the fleet size per location. Motorhome and car rentals have high seasonal variation, with the rental companies buying and selling many vehicles between the seasons.
“Automated demand-based pricing lets us focus on the big picture and specific exceptional situations, as it fully handles the day-to-day operative pricing. Cooperation with Priceff Team works very well and we have been able to find solutions to all situations during these 9 months of cooperation. Priceff provides us weekly tailor-made analytics on the key KPIs per location, like utilization, average price and demand vs. target. Those help greatly in steering the system and pricing.”
Suzanne Dorok adds.
“We as Priceff are also very happy about the smooth and solution-oriented cooperation. Roadfans has a highly data focused approach in everything they do, which is a fantastic starting point for automated pricing. Motorhome rentals take place well in advance and we are happy to see that our solution works great both when pricing a rental 250 days or 2,5 days into the future.”
Heikki Lummaa, Priceff CEO states.
Roadfans is a German company specializing in the rental and sale of motorhomes. See more at www.roadfans.de.
Priceff is a Finland based company specializing in real-time demand-based pricing. See more at www.priceff.com.
