Although not part of the platforms original MVP (Minimal Viable Product), Community Smart Pricing will be brought into the platform at a later date and is discussed here.

What’s Community Smart Pricing about?

Deciding on the right price to charge for your cars listing can be a challenging task for anyone. You search your area to see what other hosts are charging, compare your car to theirs, and wonder how you measure up. But what you don’t know is the price those cars actually get booked for (and how often they, in fact, get booked). You can’t tell how much interest your own car is generating, or if potential borrowers are willing to spend the points you’re asking. This is where Community Smart Pricing or ‘CSP’ comes in, by keeping your hourly points prices competitive as demand in your unique car type and area changes. The goal of Community Smart Pricing is to increase your chance of getting your car booked.

We’ve heard feedback from hosts that the suggested prices you see can sometimes be higher or lower than what you expect. So, we asked the team behind the Community Smart Pricing intelligence, to share some insights on how our models determine pricing suggestions. Here’s what they had to say!

How does Community Smart pricing determine its suggestions?

With Community Smart Pricing, your pricing suggestions reflect the controls you’ve set, combined with a lot of data. In fact, Community Smart Pricing takes into account over 20 different factors that could change your price. These factors, plus your controls, determine the best price for each available booking on your calendar, and your price updates to reflect changes in factors like:

  • Lead-time: as a booking date approaches, your price will update

  • Market popularity: if more people are searching for cars of your type e.g. ‘hot hatches’ in your area, your price will update

  • Seasonality: as you move into, or out of high (usually the warmer months), your price will update, also for example convertibles are more popular in the warmer months.

  • Listing popularity: if you get a lot of views and bookings, your price will update

  • Listing details: if you add more details, such as all the cars options, mods you’ve made afterwards, extra photos above the minimum, your price will update

  • Bookings history: as you get bookings, your future prices will be partly based on the prices you got for successful bookings. So, for instance, if you set your price higher than Community Smart Pricing suggests, and you get a successful booking at that price, the algorithm will update to reflect that.

  • Community reviews history: Your prices update as you get more positive reviews from successful bookings.
    • Car appearance and cleanliness: Was the car in great condition (scratches and marks) inside and out? was it how it was explained in the listing, also was the car nice and clean inside and out when you picked it up?
    • Host experience: was the pickup and drop off experience a good one, was the host on time, did they make you feel welcome?
    • Fun factor: a personal rating of just how much FUN was the car, did it live up to your expectations?

There are lots of factors at play— Community Smart Pricing even evaluates how many car fans look at your listing every day and how long they view it for! We really have built this car experience sharing platform to reflect factors you can’t discover just by simply comparing your cars listing page to others in the area.

What control do hosts have over setting their prices while using Community Smart Pricing?

Smart Pricing lets you set your prices to automatically match demand, with the goal of attracting bookings. To make sure you’re always comfortable with your listing’s daily prices, we give you a couple of simple settings to establish the boundaries you’re comfortable with:

  • The minimum price you set is the lowest your price will go when demand for your car is low. This means booking prices may drop to attract more drivers to book, but never below the threshold you set.
  • The maximum price you set is the highest price your car can be booked for, even on high demand periods like public holidays. You can set this as high as $10,000 per day, and it is not publicly displayed. Currently, every listing must include a maximum price setting.

At any time, if you see prices you disagree with for a date, you can just type a new price in your calendar or adjust your minimum or maximum price in your Community Smart Pricing settings.

How does Community Smart Pricing interact with other pricing settings?

Prices guests see can be adjusted based on some other settings you have in place, but not all.  For example:

  • If Community Smart Pricing is turned on, your weekend price setting will not be used. However, we will make sure the recommended price stays above your minimum price setting, including on weekends.

  • Extra driver fees and are applied to bookings in the same way whether Smart Pricing is on or off.

  • Weekly and monthly discounts get applied to the prices on your calendar for longer stays whether Community Smart Pricing is on or off.

We’re always adding flexibility to Community Smart Pricing, such as the ability to turn it off for certain days only. And we appreciate hearing your ideas on how to improve this feature. We do this by surveying and interviewing drivers and hosts all over, staying current on topics and comments in the community center, and testing new features with small groups of drivers and hosts.

That’s a long way to say, we appreciate all of your feedback and how much you care about helping improve the community. Stay tuned for updates. And to see what other hosts are saying about Community Smart Pricing, join the conversation in the Community Center.

Community Smart pricing UI (User Interface) mockup: