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How to get rate decisions into a car hire booking system such as Rental Car Manager safely: mapping, guardrails, approval and write-back, with templates.
By the DayRunner team ·
Connect it in four layers: map your car types to the market's, decide which rate fields a change is allowed to touch, set guardrails, and put a human approval step in front of every write. Then the data can flow either way, by API, by scheduled export, or by hand, without a bad number going live. Start with the mapping. It's the step most likely to go wrong.
Every car hire booking system, whether it's Rental Car Manager, HQ Rental Software or something built in-house, holds rates in roughly the same shape:
A pricing change has to land in the right one of those, for the right dates, without breaking the others.
| Method | How it works | Good for | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Typed in | Someone keys the new rates from a sheet | A few changes a week | Typos, missed date ranges |
| Import file | Upload a CSV or spreadsheet in the system's format | Bulk season loads | Format changes, overwriting the wrong table |
| Scheduled export | The system emails or saves a report each day | Reading bookings out | Only one direction |
| API | Software reads and writes rates directly | Daily changes, many car types | Access, testing, error handling |
Rental Car Manager and HQ have APIs. Most other systems can at least send a scheduled report export. If your system can email a report, that's usually enough to read bookings out. Writing rates back is where you need an API or an import.
List every category in your system and match it to the market's categories. See car category mapping.
Decide which field a change can touch, for example the daily rate per category per pick-up week, and leave everything else alone.
A floor, a ceiling and a maximum move per change, per car type.
Produce a suggested rate with its reason. A person accepts, edits or rejects it.
Apply approved changes, record who approved what and when, and the old and new rate.
Look at the rate on your website and on a broker page the next day.
The market sorts cars into broad categories. Your system probably has more, or different names. Rate Pulse, for example, uses categories such as mini, economy, compact, intermediate, SUVs and people carriers.
Copy this mapping table:
| Your category | Your ACRISS | Market category | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Toyota Corolla or similar | CDAR | Compact | |
| Toyota RAV4 or similar | IFAR | SUVs | |
| Kia Carnival | SVAR | 8-seat carrier | Only 4 in fleet |
| Hybrid hatch | CDAH | Compact | Priced 5% over compact |
Get it wrong and every comparison after it is wrong. A mid-size SUV mapped to "compact" will always look wildly overpriced.
Guardrails stop a bad input from becoming a bad price. Set them per car type.
| Car type | Floor per day | Ceiling per day | Max move per change | Max moves per week |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Compact | $95 | $260 | 10% | 2 |
| SUV | $150 | $380 | 10% | 2 |
| 8-seat | $190 | $450 | 8% | 1 |
The floor comes from your costs. The ceiling comes from what customers have paid at your busiest. The maximum move stops a rate swinging 40% overnight because one competitor ran a sale.
These operator numbers are hypothetical. The market rate is real.
Say you run 40 cars at Auckland. Your compact rate for next week is $150. The typical compact at Auckland in the Rate Pulse sweep of 7 Nov 2026 was $139. Your bookings for that week are 12% ahead of the same point last year.
Your rule says: when pace is ahead, hold or raise; when it's behind, move toward the market. Pace is ahead, so the recommendation is to hold at $150, or raise by up to the 10% maximum move.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Car type | Compact |
| Pick-up week | 16 Nov |
| Current rate | $150 |
| Market typical | $139 |
| Pace vs last year | +12% |
| Recommended rate | $160 |
| Reason | Pace ahead, already above market, small rise within max move |
| Approved by | |
| Applied |
$160 is 6.7% up, inside the 10% cap and under the $260 ceiling. A person approves it, the write-back updates only the compact daily rate for that week, and the log records it. Next day, you check the broker page to see where $160 now ranks.
Rate Pulse gives you the market side: typical and cheapest rates by car category and pick-up day, your brand's position, ratings and dates to watch. It doesn't connect to your booking system and doesn't change rates.
Connecting the two, mapping, guardrails, approvals and write-back, is the work we do in revenue management. Duncan has built Rental Car Manager integrations, and each job is scoped to how you run. See booking system integration and rate management for what that covers.
No. An API makes it faster, but a scheduled report export and a careful import, or even a typed-in rate sheet, will work. Start with whatever your system supports and automate the slow steps later.
Not at first. Have a person approve each change for a few months. Once the recommendations are trusted and the guardrails are tested, you can let small moves through on their own.
No. Rate Pulse is free market data on the website. Connecting it, and your own bookings, to your booking system is consulting work we scope per operator.
Forecasting, rate management and booking-system integration, scoped to how you run.