How to Create a Car Rental Website like Blue Car Rental and Europcar

The European car rental market is prospering with a CAGR of 11.20% in the forecast period 2023-2032. From the $17.56 billion market size, the industry is expected to reach $41.07 billion by the end of the projection period. Due to increasing tourism and sustainable mobility approaches, the European car rental market is also expected to serve up to 72.06 million users by 2029. Thus, entering into the car rental industry looks quite promising. However, in the digital age, consumer needs have shifted towards more digital and diversified means of renting cars.

To cater to modern consumer needs, both new and old car rental businesses have adapted the online car rental business model. This includes businesses such as Blue Car Rental, launched in 2010, and Europcar, founded in 1949. To match the level of customer experience that these online players provide, car rental companies require fast and reliable car rental websites that can help them accept 24/7 bookings and timely cater to the changing consumer requirements. 

Let’s understand how you can develop a car rental website like Blue Car Rental and Europcar without compromising any features and functionalities. 

About Blue Car Rental and Europcar

In this blog, we are taking the reference of two successful online car rental companies, which are Blue Car Rental and Europcar. Both these companies were launched ages apart but had to adapt the digital means to serve their respective markets.

1. Blue Car Rental

Based in Iceland, Blue Car Rental stepped into the rental industry in 2010 with a strong value proposition of simplifying local car rentals and has been committed to providing top-tier services. Blue Car Rental’s ethos to deliver superior customer service emphasizes heavily on transparency and customer safety. Living up to its promises, Blue Car Rental provides 24/7 on-road assistance for all its rentals.

How it works:

• Users visit the Blue Car Rental website and enter rental dates and location
• Based on their inputs, the website displays available car options
• Customers select their preferred rental car and select add-ons
• They provide necessary details such as driving license no, residential address and make payment
• After using, customers drop-off the car to the selected return location

• Available in: Iceland
• Launched in: 2010
• Estimated Revenue: $16 million

2. Europcar

Europcar is a global car rental company with a massive fleet size of over 250,000 fleet. Headquartered in France, Europcar’s services are available in 140 countries across multiple continents. With over 70 years in existence, Europcar benefits from its history and heritage and also sponsors sports events to stay relevant in the global market. Along with the Europcar brand, the Europcar group operates two other online car rental businesses, which are Goldcar and Fox – Rent a Car.

How it works:

• Users visit the Europcar website and enter rental dates and location
• Based on their inputs, the website displays available car options
• Customers select their preferred rental car and select add-ons
• They provide necessary details such as driving license no,flight now, residential address and make payment
• After using, customers drop-off the car to the original pickup location

• Available in: Multiple
• Launched in: 1949
• Estimated Revenue: $3-3.5 billion

Benefits of Launching a Car Rental Website

For existing car rental companies and new entrants, launching a car rental website unlocks numerous benefits. It helps them establish a name and scale remotely. They can cater to wider pick-up and drop-off locations while ensuring satisfying customer service.

Here are some ways launching a car rental website like Blue Car Rental and Europcar is beneficial for your business:

1. Accept 24/7 Bookings

The business never slows down with a car rental website. It enables business owners to accept 24/7 bookings remotely. Along with accepting bookings, businesses can automate and execute other processes like collecting rental security, verifying documents and licenses, and preparing rental invoices.  

2. Reduce Operational Costs

The automation of key processes comes with various other benefits, such as elimination of manual error and reduction in overall operational costs. Car rental businesses are no longer required to hire booking personnel and can also cut down utility costs such as electricity bills and employee insurance. 

3. Fleet Management

Managing the fleet is quite a challenge in the car rental sector because of varying rental dates and car models. Today, there are many car rental software available in the market that help you track rental cars and manage inventory efficiently. These software have a maintenance buffer period and other features for unavailability management and collecting late return fines.

4. Establish a Brand Image

The brand image of the company makes the first impression on the customer’s mind and having a car rental website is the very first touchpoint to establish that image. With their dedicated car rental websites, businesses can leave a positive impression and build a solid reputation that remains in the customers’ minds. They can look highly professional and deliver car rental services on par with the leading players.

5. Leverage Digital Marketing

In the globally interconnected world, digital marketing has become imperative and crucial for the survival of any business. For car rental companies, leveraging digital marketing options becomes easier with dedicated websites. Business owners can easily create landing pages to launch various campaigns, do SEO to build an online presence, and use paid marketing to increase conversion rates. 

Key Features Required to Build a Car Rental Website like Blue Car Rental

Rental operations are different from sales operations and require a completely different set of features. Without the essential features, the rental website will fail to provide the aforementioned benefits and will only serve as a liability to your car rental business. Thus, make sure to get the following features on your car rental website:

• Hourly, Daily & Weekly Pricing: To apply multiple pricing strategies and cater to the requirements of various customers, hourly, daily, and weekly rental pricing features are helpful. 
• Booking Calendar: The booking calendar is a must on every car rental website. It displays vehicle availability to customers, accepts rental date inputs, and prevents double booking. 
• Document Verification: The document verification feature is required to collect and verify statutory documents as per the target market, for example, driving license and residential address. This feature also helps in ensuring the safety of rental cars. 
• Rental Security Collection: Another feature that helps in ensuring fleet safety is rental security collection. Any sort of damage can be reimbursed from the rental security amount. 
• Rental Invoicing: Regular invoicing algorithms do not work for rental orders. Rental invoicing includes many variables such as the rental duration, applicable rental pricing, rental security amount, discounts, and taxes. Thus, a dedicated rental invoicing system should be present on the website.

Sales Invoicing	Rental Invoicing
Sales Price	Selected Rental Duration
Discounts	Applicable Rental Fee
Taxes	Security Deposit
	Discounts
	Taxes

• Rental Agreement Management: To sanction your rental terms and conditions, a rental agreement management feature along with an eSign option should be present on your car rental website.
• Rental Add-ons: For upselling purposes, you can offer various complementary products and services on the website. These can include chauffeur service, child seats, a cool storage box, built-in car WiFi, visors, and more.
• Vehicle Inspection: For enhanced customer experience, you can integrate the inspection option on the website. The customers can thoroughly inspect a vehicle before starting the rental period and inform any pre-existing issues and concerns. 
• GPS-based Map View Filter: The GPS-enabled map view filter will display nearby cars to customers and increase your overall rate of booking.
• Overdue Returns Tracking: Tracking returns is a challenge for every car rental company. With dedicated features, they can automate returns tracking.
• Late Returns Management: For encouraging timely returns and recovering any losses due to late returns, the car rental website needs late returns management features that can help the admin levy tiered late return charges.
• Unavailability Management: Many times car rental companies rent out cars via offline means. To sync them with the online inventory, the unavailability management option can help. It will help you state the number of unavailable days on a product level without taking down the listing or inventory.
• Maintenance Buffer Period: Once the rental period is over, the vehicle has to go through various checks and inspections to ensure no damage. Your car rental website should let you define a buffer period for syncing the under-maintenance inventory with online inventory.
• Multilingual and Multi-Currency Support: In markets with diverse audiences, including both immigrants and tourists, having multilingual and multi-currency features is very important.
• Discounts and Promotions: Discounts and promotions help businesses attract a larger audience and increase conversions. They also help car rental companies compete with other players with their own festive offers. 
• Reports and Analytics: To make data-driven business decisions, in-depth analytics for top-performing vehicles, highest-paying customers, regions, revenue generation reports, etc., are important. 

Ways to Develop a Car Rental Website

There are three different approaches to develop a full-fledged car rental website. 

1. Bespoke or Custom Development

The custom development approach is the traditional software development approach that requires the entire source code to be programmed from scratch. This approach involves multiple processes and follows the proper SDLC framework which includes planning, feasibility analysis, design, development, testing, deployment, and maintenance. Even before beginning with the custom development approach, business owners need clarity about the tech stack they want to select and screen a development team.

Software development companies charge on an hourly basis, making the entire project highly cost-inclusive. However, the custom development approach still gives maximum flexibility to business owners out of all development approaches and is suitable for enterprise-level software development. 

Benefits of Custom Development

• Provides the maximum flexibility to car rental businesses
• Have the option to select any preferred tech-stack
• Suitable for developing enterprise-level software applications

Cons of Custom Development

• Time-consuming
• Highly cost-inclusive with hourly development charges
• Require constant project monitoring from stakeholders
• The end product is not tried and tested for the market

2. Using a SaaS Software

SaaS software, an acronym for Software as a Service, refers to cloud-hosted solutions that are hosted on the software provider’s own servers and provided as a monthly service.  They do not require the entire website to be developed from scratch but are rather more of a drag-and-drop builder. SaaS software is categorized into multiple-tiered packages with each package having more offerings than the other. It is only in the most premium package that business owners can access all the features of the software.

While SaaS software is easy to set up, it does come with several limitations, such as restrictions on the number of transactions and users. In order to remove those restrictions, car rental companies are bound to upgrade to a higher package. In terms of customization, the SaaS software approach offers the least customizability out of all three options. 

Benefits of Using SaaS Software

• Easy to set up
• Are pre-hosted

Cons of Using SaaS Software

• Not scalable. Have restricted transactions and users
• Costly in the long run
• Only have basic rental features

3. Using a Fully Owned Rental Software

A fully owned self-hosted software comes with a lifetime usage license. A primary benefit of using a fully owned rental solution is the flexibility and freedom it gives you over the car rental website. You can host the solution on your choice of server and remove all hosting-related limitations, this includes onboarding as many users and doing unlimited transactions. Additionally, as no recurring charges are involved, fully owned software are the ideal solution for long-term rental operations.

In terms of features and functionalities, fully owned software have a plethora of features. As you get the source code ownership with fully owned software, these solutions are highly customizable. You can integrate popular business tools, add new features, and design new workflows depending on your business requirements. 

Benefits of Using Fully Owned Software

• Time and cost-effective
• Available at a one-time cost
• Provide the freedom to host on your server
• Fully customizable and scalable
• Highly cost-effective for long-term operations

Cons of Using Self-Hosted Software

• Need to manage hosting 
• The choice of tech stack is not available

Thus, due to the various benefits, extensive feature set, and customizability, using a fully owned software with advanced rent-centric features and a scalable architecture emerges to be the most reliable development approach for your requirements. It is highly recommended for existing car rental companies planning to conduct long-term business operations or for new entrants investing in well-developed car rental markets.

How Yo!Rent Car Rental Software Helps?

There are numerous car rental software available in the market, but in terms of features and capabilities, none comes close to Yo!Rent. Built with next-gen purpose-driven features, Yo!Rent takes care of every little car rental business use case. From accepting rental date inputs and collecting security to document verification and tracking overdue returns, Yo!Rent caters to all these requirements. Moreover, Yo!Rent comes with an industry-specific design with a homepage personalization option to help you build and launch a highly professional car rental marketplace. Along with single-vendor operations, Yo!Rent can be used to launch a multi-vendor car rental marketplace like Turo as well. 

Key Reasons to Select Yo!Rent

• Best in Industry Feature Set: Yo!Rent has the most impressive feature set including rent-centric features such as tiered pricing, security deposit collection, split payment, document verification, rental agreement management, RFQ, rental add-ons, late returns & cancellations, and more.

• Fully Customizable and Scalable: To support any additional features and business requirements, Yo!Rent is fully customizable. Additionally, as you get complete control over the car rental platform, there are no restrictions on the number of listings, transactions, and user profiles 

• Comes with Lifetime Usage License: Yo!Rent is available at a one-time cost and comes with a lifetime usage license. Thus, your one-time investment is a lifetime investment in Yo!Rent. You can hassle-free migrate to and from Yo!Rent.

• Industry-Specific Design: Customers prefer a superior customer experience that matches those of leading players. Yo!Rent’s layouts, color schemes, and all design elements align with car rental industry standards to help you build a highly professional and reliable car rental website without much effort.

• 12-Months Free Technical Support: To ensure you uninterrupted car rental operations, Yo!Rent comes with 12 months of free technical support that includes any bugs and errors in the source. Additionally, free training hours are available with Yo!Rent to help you onboard the platform. 

Final Words

Unlike many other products and services, car rental is an essential, just like general commodities. One day or the other, a consumer requires a rental car and their selection depends on many factors, such as the reliability of the car, make, model, and quality of rental service provided. For the latter, consumers prefer renting out cars from companies with high brand reputations and from those that have an easy rental process. Both these requirements can be fulfilled by developing a car rental website. In this article, our references were Blue Car Rental and Europcar, but depending on market demand and business preferences, you can develop various types of car rental websites for different business models.