EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Vienna. Many million tourists come to visit the most livable city in the world every year. With an area of approximately 415 km² and many sights such as castles, parks, vineyards, and leisure areas, Vienna has a lot to offer. Nevertheless, it can be quite challenging to explore a city with so many great places to visit. That is where MietRadl' comes into play – an idea developed by five students at Vienna University of Economics and Business.

Goal

Since we want to provide every tourist with a bike, we came up with a business model enabling us to do so in a profitable way by creating value for the hotels and tourists involved. While working on this project, we focused on designing an offer that would contribute to minimizing the CO2 emissions in such a densely populated region. Ultimately, the MietRadl' team came up with the idea to offer 4-star hotels in Vienna an appropriate, highly flexible rental service for city bikes, as well as electric bikes. By implementing our service, the hotels can save significant amounts of money in comparison to organizing a bike rental service themselves or using another supplier.

Methodology

We started our journey by conducting explorative interviews with prospective customers, namely the hotels. By using these findings, we designed structured interviews, which further helped us design our business model. Subsequently, we validated our assumptions by sending out two surveys to 75 hotels. Afterward, we combined the results of the first iterations into two prototypes, which on the one hand displayed a sophisticated version of our offering, and on the other hand, a simpler and, therefore, more affordable version. These prototypes were then implemented into our landing page, where we conducted an A/B split test and offered the potential customers the opportunity to sign up for our newsletter.

Results

To begin, the most important finding is the significant demand for an affordable and simple rental service for bicycles among Viennese hotels. As this need was clearly identifiable in the different iterations but especially prevalent among 4-star hotels, we decided to focus on this customer group by employing the beachhead-market strategy. What is worth being highlighted is that hotels frequently mentioned liquidity issues concerning the costs of acquiring bicycles. In addition to those costs, they also named the incremental expenses for employees and organizational efforts as their most important reasons to subscribe to our service. Finally, we found a highly flexible subscription model based on monthly rental intervals will create the greatest value for hotels.

Contact Person

• Teresa Brunnauer
  teresa.brunnauer@s.wu.ac.at

Student Team

• Teresa Brunnauer – Project Manager
  Alexander Lausecker – Finance
  Vahidin Omerovic – Testing
  Florian Strauß – Visionary
  Clemens Walder – (Product) Design

Project Manager

• Quach Tuong-Vi Sophie

• Staub Alexander