HOMEAWAY
Property Rates Management
One of the core parts of the HomeAway partner experience is the rates calendar. I worked on the rates calendar and with the reservation management team to create a plan for the two calendars to merge. Our goal was to create an intuitive and comprehensive platform for all our partners to manage their businesses. We did this by including not only single property owners but also having a vision for property management companies that use the HomeAway platform.
Opportunties
The rates calendar started in a linear format to help Parters understand their seasons easily. While this made sense for long term planning, it was very cumbersome for monthly or daily management.
In order to add a new rate period in the middle of a current range, they would have make three new ranges. This was obviously tedious but also meant Partners ended up with more errors in incorrect rates in during key events. When the team moved to a calendar visual in the experience it brought a lot of wins but still didn’t map to the user’s business mental model.
The current rates calendar
Two calendars - When rates moved to a calendar system from it’s previous linear format it wasn’t merged with the reservations calendar but was made into its own stand alone calendar. This created two separate areas to manage daily tasks for a property manager. To make matters additionally hard on the user, the two calendars were not the same and had many different and confusing features.
Base rates - When a user sets up a property they define a base rate. This rate is the base value charged for the property as the calendar opens up new dates in a rolling fashion.
How are users managing today?
Tons of work - Currently the user has to make many changes for each instance they want to override.
Overrides don’t repeat annually - If a user’s base rate is set very low, someone could potentially book their property for a low rate in their high season.
Hard to keep track of seasons - Since users are creating all these different rate periods it can be very hard to remember why you changed a rate or when the change was made
Creating Seasons
Enabling annual patterns - Users can continuously define how they want to update their rates each year
Repeat annually - Reducing the work for users and making it effortless to manage their home rentals.
Integrating insights - After introducing seasons HomeAway would be able to suggest seasons or overrides based on the flights and travel data from Expedia to help owners stay competitive in their markets
User testing the one calendar experience
Breaking down the research insights
Align rates with the owner mental model
Integrate market insights to help owners understand pricing
Adding new rates
In our research sessions we tested adjusting and creating new rates and rate seasons. Overall, users were able to complete both tasks with no blockers. An interesting part of this testing was that users also showed interest in having insights information presented at this point in the experience. This helped validate our vision for the future of integrating rates with MarketMaker which provides users with helpful and informative data about their rental to help them to become a better partner.
Two views to manage rates
The original legacy view of rates made it hard to manage month to month but much easier to manage quarterly and annually. As part of the user testing we explored these two views to satisfy either day to day management or annual planning.
Rate calendar view
Integrating market insights to help owners understand pricing
Creating trust with the owners that use HomeAway is a key part of sharing industry insights. Dealing with money means that users are going to be far more concerned with updates and adjustments and all changes must be very clearly communicated. To create that trust, there are three levels in order to properly integrate market insights:
Simplifying market insights - Presenting the data in clear, actionable, and human readable formats
Opportunities - Offering suggestions from market insights
Set your strategy - Full trust established with HomeAway to set the owner’s rates
Simplifying market insights
The first step in creating a relationship of trust with owners is to offer clear and easy to understand information that is relevant to their property. This helps to build better owners while also creating trust with the HomeAway brand to provide them with useful and reliable information.
Presenting opportunities
After users have interacted consistently with the insights information, we can begin to show them opportunities. These are more direct than the previous information blurbs. This level of information gives different types of recommendations based on the industry insights related to your property.
The future with Market Maker
Once the user has interacted with the rates insights for an extended period of time the rates calendar can prompt them to set up a strategy using Market Maker. This would allow users to take the hands off the wheel and use the travel industry data from Expedia balanced with their own market level data to create rates strategies for the entire year.
Seasons defined
Holidays considered
Events