Growth design
Monetisation
The problem
PaulCamper is a marketplace where people rent out their campervans. Owners set one fixed price per night, and it stayed the same all year. Demand for campervans is anything but fixed.
In peak season, prices were too low. A VW California in Amsterdam listed at €75 a night, while similar vans on other sites charged €120. Vans booked out weeks in advance, yet owners earned less than they expected. The question support kept hearing: "Am I underpricing my listing?"
In shoulder season, prices were too high. Calendars sat empty and owners didn't know why. Pricing confusion made up nearly 15% of all owner support requests. The most common one: "Why am I not getting bookings?"
How might we help owners earn what their van is really worth in every season, without losing the trust of renters or the confidence of owners?
What I found
I spoke to owners of every size, from people renting out a single van to small fleet managers. Two quotes summed up the problem.
"I just set my price once and forgot about it. I thought no bookings meant no demand."
"My van is always fully booked in summer. I thought that was good, until I saw what others were charging."
The data showed the same pattern. When demand dropped, prices stayed put and bookings disappeared. When demand rose, prices stayed put and revenue slipped away.
Owners weren't bad at pricing. They just had no feedback telling them when to raise prices, when to lower them or what good looked like. So they did nothing, which was the most expensive choice of all.
That changed the brief. Owners didn't want more pricing controls. They wanted confidence that they were earning well, guidance without complexity and control without stress. I turned that into five principles:
Price should follow value. A fixed price in a moving market is wrong most of the year.
Price by season. The same van is worth more in July than in October.
Recommend, don't dictate. A suggested price guides behaviour. A forced one breaks trust.
Build trust, not pressure. In a marketplace, credibility converts better than urgency.
Capture the whole booking. Money that changes hands off the platform is value the marketplace has already earned.
What I designed and tested
I designed a new pricing experience and ran an A/B test against the old one, with 200 owners across Germany and the Netherlands over eight weeks. We tracked revenue, bookings, setup time and satisfaction.
Version A, the control, kept things as they were: one fixed price and no guidance.
Version B, the new design, gave owners seasonal pricing with a recommended price based on season and demand. For every recommendation, owners could:
see the recommended price,
see why, in one simple and honest reason,
see the impact, whether more bookings or more earnings,
and accept or adjust it, so they always stayed in control.
Owners could start quickly with predefined seasons or set up custom seasons for holidays and special offers.
Two lessons about trust
Show a range, not a single number. We showed a likely range of earnings instead of one confident figure. A single number that misses feels like a broken promise and makes every future suggestion suspect. A range that lands feels credible.
Gain beat loss. We tested "You could earn €X more" against "You might be missing out on €X". Behavioural economics says the loss message should win. It didn't. Because the platform profits when owners charge more, the loss message read like a sales tactic and the gain message read like advice. Trust mattered more than the textbook.
Going further: capturing the whole booking
Flexible pricing showed a clear lift, so we rolled Version B out to every owner. Then I turned to money the marketplace was already losing.
Owners often charged for extras, deposits and cleaning in cash when renters picked up the van. None of it went through PaulCamper. So we added two new layers on top of nightly pricing:
Additional services, where owners set a deposit and choose whether renters clean the van themselves or pay a cleaning fee.
Extras for hire, where owners add items like a Wi-Fi router, bed linen or a SUP, priced per night or per booking.
Payments that used to happen on the driveway now happen on the platform, where they are tracked, insured and earn commission. Same demand, more value captured.
The results
Metric | Result | Why |
|---|---|---|
Quarterly revenue | +25% | Owners using the new tools priced competitively in every season. |
Booking conversion | +30% | Starting prices matched what renters expected, instead of being a guess. |
Pricing support tickets | −35% | The dashboard answered "why am I not getting bookings?" before owners had to ask. |
Owner NPS for pricing | 32 to 58 | Owners saw the new options as extra capability, not extra work. |
Setup time for small fleets | 12 to 3 min | Quick-start presets cut setup by 75%, removing the friction that made owners do nothing. |
Shoulder season | Biggest gains | Bookings rose in every season, but empty calendars improved the most. |
Revenue and satisfaction went up at the same time. Owners earned more and trusted the system more.
What I learned
The real constraint was never pricing. It was confidence. Owners already had control. What they lacked was feedback, and without it, doing nothing felt safest.
I also learned that the only pricing change that lasts is one people trust. A price rise that renters resent or owners distrust gets reversed within a quarter. Designing for trust first is what let the revenue gains stick.
