What
A business case experiment to find out the revenue potential of a B2B platform-concept for businesses with office locations at Schiphol Airport.
The research
“We are not sure if we should invest in this platform. Can you find out what it is worth?” – Product Owner Parkflex
The idea was already there to begin with. The owners of this project found that not all parking spaces at Schiphol were being used. So maybe the owners of these spaces were willingly to rent them out to others. By taking a fee percentage on the rental price, ParkFlex could, theoretically, make a lot of money. They wanted to invest in a ‘marktplaats’ for Schiphol office owners to trade parking places.
I conducted various real life experiments and proposed a pivot to the concept in the end.
- Experiment with offering of extra parking spots to rent for a day
- Experiment with a market of parking spots (direct approach to the person using/offering the spot, like on ‘marktplaats’) -> originating from the initial statements made in interviews that they would be mainly triggered to help others, and not interested in commercial gain
- Experiment with a fixed compensation if a parking place owner would allow us to use his space ‘for the pool’ of unknown users
In addition we performed a data analysis – predicting capacity and reporting on predicted need back to the office owners to inform them on how much of the spaces they are entitled to, but are not in use.
Result
In the end it turned out there was indeed a demand for extra parking spots, but none of the participating companies were willing to give up theirs. Not for money and not for social motives (opposed to what was said in interviews). Not even if we could show them a data analysis from the previous year and guarantee they would only need 70-80% of their capacity themselves.
Therefore we proposed to Schiphol not to build a trading platform at all, but to start experimenting with ‘overbooking’ the capacity. Data showed they could do this for almost 20% of the capacity without any risks. It would solve the demand for extra spots, hurt nobody and take a minimum investment in a booking system.
It saves Schiphol from a 300K investment and makes the approximately 100K yearly while also making their corporate clients happy with the extra capacity when needed.