Silvercar by Audi

Decreasing No-Shows with Pay Now Reservations

Just as I joined Silvercar in the Fall of 2020 large cultural changes were setting in. Our company, like many others were encountering major shifts in consumer behavior due to the pandemic. Airport traffic had flatlined and one of our core businesses, airport car rental, had become wiped out almost overnight…if Silvercar was to survive it would need to adapt.

Since we were owed by Audi of America and the Volkswagen Group the decision was made to pivot the location of all Silvercar rental operations to Audi dealerships. This put the previous model of convenience that customers experienced renting at an airport into question and slightly shifted the target customer from a traveler to a local resident.

In this new business reality, a change in customer behavior emerged. There was an increase in online bookings that were resulting in a customer not showing up. This increase began to become expensive and unsustainable. To combat this, I worked with a team of 3 business owners at Silvercar to explore a fundamental pricing change. Two prices would be presented to customers, one which was the legacy model customers booked without paying and paid when their reservation was complete—and our new pricing option that was slightly lower but payment would be processed immediately when the reservation was confirmed.

Our goal with the design was to learn if we could present these options clearly, ensure that the policy change and optionality was clear to customers, make additional payment steps quick, and gather consumer feedback around which of these proposed pricing options customers would prefer and why. To meet all the requirements of this project we went through rounds of design iterations and reviews with stake holders, unmoderated user testing, and engineering feasibility sessions. At the end of the project we had developed a reservation experience that we felt confident customers understood and ultimately informed the decision to not roll out this feature. While that decision was partially due to the looming rebrand from Silvercar to Audi on demand the testing we did reinforced feelings of skepticism around the adoption of these new pricing options and other ways to decrease no-shows were uncovered (such as charging a cancelation fee/no-show fee and a reservation check-in experience which eventually made their way into future iterations of Audi on demand).