In the new normal, competitive pricing is everything – It could be the difference between a massive boost in sales or break your revenue forecast completely. Unless your product is competitively priced, it can lead to potential revenue loss in terms of losing customers. However, competitive pricing is a double-edged sword, as cut-throat pricing in the quest for revenue can cause a decline in operating profits.

This puts pricing and revenue managers in a tough spot, as they have to take carefully ascertained calls on pricing. Doing this process manually is time-consuming, with millions of rows of data to sieve through. With no indicators of real-time demand changes and fleet utilization statistics, the RMs cannot ascertain which fleet type is more/less in demand.

As the revenue managers are not aware of what bookings they have coming up, they tend to end up pricing wrongly. This means that on days that the bookings are low, the prices could be on the higher side and underpriced when the bookings are high. As they are unaware on the length of the rentals, they may be unable to optimize their fleets as well.

CarGain Canvas, RateGain’s most sought-after offering addresses these issues with an intuitive analytics dashboard.

Fixing the pricing challenge

Some of the challenges that revenue managers in the car industry face include:

  • Unprecedented demand fluctuations due to Covid Guidelines and constantly changing flight schedules
  • Lack of proper resources for analytics
  • Inability to effectively monitor market fluctuations
  • Acquisition of competitor data in real-time
  • Lack of actionable solutions for large volumes of historical or forecasted data

As an integrated analytics solution that provides a 360-degree market view on pricing and other aspects, Canvas helps revenue managers through volatile demand by identifying potential revenue loss, verifying market positions, and rectifying the pricing strategy for every market. All these combined, help RMs unlock unexplored streams of revenue in the new normal, thus eliminating uncertainty.

CarGain Canvas is the first and currently the only such platform in the car rental industry which features advanced yet easy-to-use filters that can help analyze both historical trends and track market changes instantly by monitoring booking pace and tracking utilization to get a comprehensive, overarching view of the market.

Simplified dashboard with advanced features

With Canvas, you can save time by automating market position analysis using a single-screen dashboard that provides granular level market insights. Multiple visualization formats are available, including historical trends for best-performing parameters, all in a unified window for easy access.

Understandably, due to the pandemic, historical data may not always be an ideal indicator of future trends. Knowing this fact, Canvas uses causal analytics as the base to provide pricing teams actions they should take based on real-time market updates.

Identify – Verify – Rectify!

Using the CarGain Canvas is pretty simple. Pricing and revenue managers can follow a three-pronged approach to solving their pricing challenges.

First up, the profitable opportunities need to be identified by analyzing easily accessible competitor data that includes hundreds of billions of competitor rates.

Using the Filter tool, you can get granular level insights for various data categories such as Car Type, Competition Type, Location, LOR, and Mileage.

The Toggle tool lets you switch views based on Shop Name, Country, PoS, Payment, and Sources for faster and accurate interpretation of market data.

With multiple price variance visualization formats available to choose from, you can group the data in the form of Calendars, Graphs, or Tabs.

Once you have identified the key data indicators, you now need to verify these triggers that impact demand. With just a click, you can access a tool called Pace Chart, which compares the past and present performance of you and your competitors. Real-time insights regarding demand catalysts, mode of travel, and other high-level business KPIs are easily viewable as Summary Snapshots in multiple formats for better comprehension and monitoring.

Lastly, Canvas helps rectify pricing decisions (up to 10 times faster than manual methods) by never letting you miss a price change. Real-time alerts notify you of any market changes or opportunities, thereby helping you stay up-to-date with ever-changing trends in the post-covid world.

This is possible by employing an engine that delivers super-fast analytics and generates insights of rental price data sorting it with color-coding by delta or variance, as required. The dashboard also provides quick access to the evolution of fares, helping you rectify pricing mistakes on the go. Most importantly, all the historical competitive price intelligence data gets stored on our high-performance servers with unlimited access and storage capacity.

Reliable technology that produces stunning results

Backed with cutting-edge technology such as Cloud Burst, BigQuery, and PUBSUB alongside an in-house data lake and automated data quality checks, you can be sure that the platform runs fine at any given point of time, without having to worry about loss of data or application downtime.

Canvas is a part of a cloud-based SaaS that you can access from any part of the world with a valid user id and password. Most browsers such as Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple Safari are natively supported, although we personally recommend Google Chrome. Have a specific requirement? Get Canvas customized by our specialist team to attain your goals.

If you are a revenue manager who wishes to spearhead the growth of your organization with intelligent pricing decisions, contact us right away for a free CarGain Canvas demo.

About the Author

Abhishek Goel
Vice President – Product Management
RateGain