A single departure on the Helsinki–Tallinn route isn't priced once. It's priced separately for passenger tickets and car tickets, each with its own demand pattern, on top of the usual swings by season, weekday and time of day. Eckerö Line needed a pricing model that could account for all of it at once, while staying easy for customers to understand.
Pricing a ferry route isn't pricing one thing
Before Priceff, adjusting fares to match all of these moving parts meant relying on manual judgment calls, made one route and one departure at a time. It worked, but it left revenue on the table during high-demand sailings and made it hard to test more ambitious pricing without the risk of getting it wrong.
A demand-based model, with room for judgment
Priceff built a dynamic pricing model that factors in demand fluctuations, seasonal trends, weekdays, departure times and ticket type, adjusting passenger and car ticket prices automatically every day, while still letting the Eckerö Line team step in and override prices manually whenever they want to.
Higher prices, more passengers
Since piloting the solution in spring 2024, Eckerö Line has tested wider price ranges than they'd previously used, achieving a higher average ticket price and year-over-year passenger growth at the same time, a combination that's difficult to pull off with manual pricing alone.
"We are very happy with how Priceff's dynamic pricing solution operates. It enables us to automatically optimize ticket prices based on real-time demand while staying aligned with our business objectives. The results speak for themselves: passenger numbers increased year-over-year, and we achieved a higher average ticket price, leading to a clear revenue boost. The automation has allowed us to test a wider price range than before, and it's fantastic to see that we achieved both higher passenger numbers and an increased average ticket price — normally a challenging combination. It's also important to note that prices always remain within set boundaries, ensuring a customer-friendly approach," says Stefan Nordlund, Sales Manager at Eckerö Line.
What this means for ferry operators
"The ferry industry presents unique pricing challenges due to fluctuating demand for each journey and for both passenger and car travel," says Heikki Lummaa, former CEO of Priceff. Eckerö Line's results, growing both price and volume together, show what's possible when pricing responds to that demand in real time, rather than being set weeks in advance.
