Rent A Car Optimizes Fleet Utilization and Increases Revenue by 30% with Dynamic Pricing

With 350 locations, Rent A Car is a leading car rental company in France. When Oscar Boré, CIO of Rent A Car, joined the company, his mission was to drive the company’s digital transformation, including better pricing and yield management. Boré succeeded by implementing Pricemoov’s next-generation pricing platform, leveraging historical and competitor data and demand forecasts to compute the right price at any moment. 

Lacking the Agility to Optimize Prices

To fine-tune prices, Rent A Car needs to account for rental duration, scheduling, location, and mileage across multiple car and van categories. Multiply all these factors, and each location is dealing with thousands of pricing decisions every day. 

The company used a pricing component in its ERP software to change prices. "Since this tool was not purpose-built for price management, it proved a nightmare to use,” explains Boré. 

Rent A Car’s pricing strategy revolved around two seasonal price grids. Location managers applied a percentage variation to the whole grid to enact desired price changes. Changing prices at a more granular level was so complex that managers only did so reactively, based on current demand and seasonal holidays. Despite trying to put the pricing tool to best use, managers were never going to achieve the level of pricing sophistication that Rent A Car envisioned. 

“Our locations lacked pricing flexibility due to the old-style tool that we used. It was impossible to manually change thousands of prices every day. As a result, we missed opportunities to realize higher revenues and better margins,” explains Boré.

Taking the First Step With Centralized Price Management

Each Rent A Car location operates autonomously, unleashing an entrepreneurial spirit that serves the business well. However, the decentralized setup proved challenging when it came to pricing. 

“Pricing is a strategic exercise that calls upon lots of data and complex computations that we can’t expect our location managers to master,” continues Boré.

To address this issue, Rent A Car launched a pricing department at headquarters. With a big-picture view of the business and competitors, this department can recommend optimal prices for each location. In turn, location managers can choose to accept, change, or refuse the recommendations. To complete the transformation, Rent A Car's pricing department and location managers needed dedicated software to better manage and optimize prices. 

Increasing Turnover by Car with Dynamic Pricing

Pricemoov proved the perfect solution, using intelligent algorithms to calculate prices dynamically based on the factors that matter to Rent A Car. 

While the pricing department recommends prices, location managers apply their local knowledge to determine final prices. On the Pricemoov platform, managers can see intelligent price recommendations and their position relative to competitors. They can also optimize prices with just two clicks, whenever local market dynamics require.

According to Boré, dynamic pricing has transformed Rent A Car’s business. “Pricemoov enables us to flexibly and easily change prices and realize higher turnover by car and revenue. We can rent cars for the best price in the moment and improve our fleet utilization,” he says.

Driving Additional Revenue and Further Automating Pricing 

Since implementing Pricemoov, Rent A Car has increased revenue by up to 30% year over year and daily revenue by car by up to 16% in multiple locations. “With Pricemoov, we’ll be able to increase turnover by car in each location. We also plan to apply dynamic pricing to other customer segments, allowing us to positively impact 60% of our revenue,” he continues. 

Rent A Car plans to take advantage of additional Pricemoov features that enable the pricing department to automate most price changes and be alerted to issues. “The department will be freed to focus on prices that are triggered by what we consider bad behaviors so they can best advise managers how to correct them,” says Boré.

Gaining Invaluable Pricing Expertise from a Trusted Partner

According to Boré, Rent A Car is extremely selective in the vendors it works with. Having felt overlooked in past vendor relationships, he finds the Pricemoov partnership refreshing. 

“We see Pricemoov as a trusted advisor and a natural extension of our team,” Boré explains. He gives the example of Pricemoov suggesting price grids before the high season so Rent A Car could proactively navigate the effects of inflation. 

“Our business would have suffered significantly during this volatile time without Pricemoov. Instead, we can granularly adjust prices to fully optimize revenue and margin across our fleets. Simply put, the partnership enables us to make intelligent pricing decisions quickly and efficiently,” he continues.

Pleased with the results to date, Rent A Car plans to build on the strength of this partnership. “Pricemoov is essential to our business and will be integral to our success in the future,” concludes Boré.