Why we price every ride class at once instead of one at a time

Early versions of many booking flows ask you to choose a vehicle and then show a price. It seems reasonable. It is also the wrong order, and we changed it deliberately.

What goes wrong with choose-then-price

When you pick first and see the price second, you are making a decision without the information that most affects it. If the price is higher than you expected, you go back and pick something smaller, and you do that on price alone rather than on whether the smaller vehicle actually suits your trip.

The result is people booking vehicles that do not fit their luggage, discovering it at the kerb, and having a bad experience that started with an interface decision.

Pricing the whole lineup

Instead, every ride class available on your route is priced together and shown as a list, with the seat count on each. The comparison is immediate: this is what an Economy costs for this exact trip, this is what an XL costs, and here is what each one seats.

You then choose knowing both halves.

Why the seat count is on the card

Because the most common booking mistake is choosing for the number of people and forgetting the number of bags. Putting seats next to the price at the moment of choosing is the cheapest possible intervention against that.

We would like to show luggage capacity too. That is harder to state honestly across a mixed fleet, so we show seats and say plainly in our writing that bags are the thing people forget.

The trade-off

Pricing every option takes marginally longer than pricing one. For a long intercity route you may notice a moment's wait. We think that is a good trade for a decision made with full information, and the alternative would be a faster screen that produces worse bookings.

What this reflects

A general principle: show the cost of a choice at the moment the choice is made, not afterwards. Most of the fare-related complaints a platform receives trace back to violating that in some small way.