Prices, packages and holiday courses: a driving school's prices page

What does a parent need from a prices page before calling?

Enough to decide whether the call is worth making. A parent comparing two schools wants the cost of the whole course, not of one lesson, and a learner wants to know whether lessons in an automatic cost more than in a manual. The school sets every one of those facts, so every one belongs on the page, which makes the prices page an answer page in all but name.

• One lesson: its length in minutes, its price, and whether automatic and manual are priced differently.
• Packages: each by its own name, with the number of lessons, the length of each, the total, and how long the package stays valid.
• Intensive and holiday courses: the dates of the next runs, hours per day, total hours, the price, and what happens on the last day.
• The road test: whether the price covers booking the test, a warm-up lesson and the school's car on the day.
• Pickup: the area where it is included, and the charge outside it.
• Cancellation: the notice needed, what a late change costs, and what happens to unused lessons.
• Payment: when it is due, whether a package can be paid in installments, and whether prices include sales tax or VAT where you operate.
• License categories: if the school teaches more than one, each with its own prices, named the way your licensing authority names them.

None of this is a rule about what to charge. It is the list of what a parent will otherwise ask on the phone, and what an assistant asked "how much are driving lessons at [school]" can answer only if the page states it. The questions that come before price are collected in what learners and parents ask an assistant.

A prices table a school can copy

A table keeps each price beside what it buys. Every row is a whole fact, and the headings say what each cell is, for a person reading on a phone or a program reading the HTML. Put a line above it with the date the prices apply from.

Write the currency beside every price. If prices differ between locations or instructors, give each location its own table with its own date rather than a note saying prices vary, because a parent needs the price that applies to them and a note gives them nothing to compare.

Intensive and holiday courses: dates first, then the last day

An intensive course is sold on its dates, so the dates come first: the start and end of each run in the coming season, the hours per day, and how many places are left. A parent planning around a school holiday is asking a calendar question. A page that still shows last season's runs answers it wrongly, and a page that shows none answers it not at all.

Then say what happens on the last day. Does the price include a road test, and who books it? Where test dates are set by the licensing authority, say so, and say what the school does when no date falls inside the course. If a learner is not ready by the final lesson, say whether the course ends there, whether extra lessons are offered and at what price, and whether the car on test day is still included later.

Holiday courses have a season, and publishing the next one before anyone asks is a job of its own, covered in reaching next year's new drivers.

What "included" has to spell out

"Included" is a word a parent reads carefully, so spell out every item rather than leaving it to a heading. For a driving school these are the items that change the total. Write yes or no against each, and the charge wherever the answer is no.

• Pickup and drop-off: from home, from school or from work, within which area, and the charge outside it.
• The car on test day: whether the school's car can be used for the road test, and whether a warm-up lesson comes with it.
• The test fee: whether it is in the price or paid separately to the licensing authority.
• Knowledge-test preparation: whether materials, classes or app access are part of a package.
• Fuel and insurance for lessons: say that they are in the lesson price, if they are, even if nobody asks.
• Progress notes: whether a parent hears how the lessons are going, and how.

An item nobody asks about still belongs on the list if it changes the total. A package that looks cheap because the test-day car is extra is a price the parent learns the truth about later. A package that includes the car should say so where the price is.

Cancellation terms a parent can read in one paragraph

Write the terms as a paragraph on the prices page, not only in the booking system's small print. A template, with your own terms in place of the brackets:

Lessons can be moved or canceled free of charge up to [hours] hours before the start. Later changes are charged at [the full / half the] lesson price. If your instructor cancels, we rebook the lesson at no charge. If the weather makes a lesson unsafe, we rebook it at no charge. Lessons missed through illness can be moved with [notice on the day / a note]. Unused lessons in a package stay valid for [months] and are then refunded [in full / at the single-lesson rate / not at all].

Those six sentences answer the questions a parent asks before paying for a package, and they are the terms the front desk has to explain anyway. Written once on the page, they are explained the same way every time.

Why the prices belong in the HTML, not in a PDF or a picture

Our audit of 9,483 small business websites found 2.1% keeping their real content, such as the price list or the service menu, in a PDF, and 3.0% rendering their content only in JavaScript. Neither is a driving-school figure: both describe the whole sample, all 40 trades together. The pages were not short, either: the median homepage ran to 880 words. The audit's point was that what the pages said was not in a form a machine could attribute, quote or verify.

Each format fails in its own way. A PDF is a second document that an AI crawler may never fetch and a parent has to download. A picture of a price list carries no text. A package list that a script draws arrives empty at a fetcher that runs no scripts; Google does render scripts, though its JavaScript SEO documentation treats that rendering as a later, separate step. A table in the HTML has none of these problems. The PDF trap covers files in general.

Once the prices are text, structured data can repeat them. Each package is an Offer with a price and a priceCurrency, and the lessons it buys can be described as a Service. Google's local business documentation also reads a priceRange for the business as a whole. Mark up only the prices the page shows, and change both on the same day. The rest of what a school's site should state is in the overview for driving schools.