Hello, I have a suggestion for zipcar management team.
I hope you can transfer this suggestion to your management team.
My location is in Brookline Village, MA. Recently, I found some of hybrid cars were removed near my location. I hypothesized that your management team tried to increase hybrid cars to test how the customers and markets reacted and if the profits increased. Obviously, the project did not work, so the number of hybrid cars has decreased recently. However, the decreasing of hybrid car, I guess, also reduced the income in weekdays.
I have a way that can increase the number of hybrid cars and also raise profits. Zipcar Company needs increase the numbers of hybrid cars and locations, and set the prices of those cars different in the weekdays (hour-price) from weekends (day-price).
According my observation, in the weekdays people need zipcars for short trips and use them individually. Those customers are high price sensitivity, and hybrid cars are their first choices. In the weekends or holidays, people usually used zipcars for long trips with friends or family, and all they concern are getting cars and have fun, so their price sensitivity is not high. Zipcar Company can make hybrid cars rented as day-price.
Those suggestions are based on my experience and observation. If Zipcar company wants to know if it works or not, just build a model and run it for result. I have 70% sure it will work.
Chungjen Chou
Lovesky6@gmail.com
