Pricing Simulation: Universal Rental Car - 'how to Play' Audio Script

Pricing Simulation: Universal Rental Car

'How to Play' Audio Script

In this simulation, you are the newly appointed District Manager for Universal Rental Car in Florida. Your mission is to develop a pricing strategy for the region in order to improve performance. Depending on the configuration chosen by your instructor, you'll set weekday and weekend prices for your rental car inventory in one, two, or three cities in the Florida region.

When you first login, the Prepare section provides you with basic information on Universal Rental Car and how the simulation works. Note that there is a downloadble pdf file you can print if you'd like a reference guide on how to play.

The Analyze section presents numerous sources of information to help you make your pricing decisions each month. The Dashboard Overview provides a high level view of your market share, unit sales, capacity utilization, and fleet size in each of the cities you're managing. You're competing against one competitor, shown here in gray. Note that the simulation starts in October, but you are given three months of historical data to review.

As district manager, you need to make monthly pricing decisions over the course of the next simulated year. On the right of the screen you'll always see the Decide panel. Here you can enter your weekday and weekend prices for each of your cities. If your instructor has enabled capacity changes, you'll also be able to move cars between cities once every three months.

In order to make your pricing decisions, review the details in the Analyze subscreens.

The Price History screen shows both your price history and your competitor's price history. On any of these Analyze screens, you can toggle between "view graphs" and "view data." The data view shows you the same information in tabular form. Clicking on "copy to clipboard" will paste the data on your computer's clipboard for copying into your spreadsheet program of choice, most typically Excel.

Next, the Market Demand screen tracks both the overall market size, as well as how you and your competitor split the market. The dotted lines track forecasted demand based on expected seasonality shifts. .

The Unit Sales screen shows unit sales for both Universal and your competitor mapped against the price in each month.

Fleet Size tracks any changes you make to the fleet size over the course of the simulation. If enabled by your instructor, you'll be able to redistribute your inventory across cities, but you can't increase the overall size of your fleet.

Capacity Utilization tracks how much of your capacity you actually use over the course of the simulation, as well as your monthly orders.

The Market