The Executive Rent a Car operation I worked for was a national business of 44 locations with a combined rental fleet count of approximately 800 cars and trucks.
The owners of the business attempted a restructuring to survive the downturn in the Mexican tourism industry and the resulting cut throat competition rental rates to follow but finally decided to close operations and focus investment with their other interests.
Nevertheless, because my role was the head the assessment exercise, to test the competitiveness of the ORION car rental management software we had been operating on for almost 25 years, this restructuring period provided me personally an invaluable understanding of the car rental software system options available and the advantages versus the disadvantages of each.
As a gentle reminder, if you find this analysis helpful, please be generous and click on at least one (hopefully more) of the advertisements on the right, to support my information sharing effort.
Before continuing, I need to add a standard internet disclaimer tag: “The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of others.”
For our project, our beginning research point was finding out the capabilities of the three dominant market players, Blue Bird, Rent Centric and TSD and also to go through the list of vendors from this link: http://www.capterra.com/car-rental-software/ (which, for the most part, we found was not helpful, for conflict of interest reasons). The Capterra site is a corporate money making advertisement site. They earn from their own version of Pay-Per-Click, similar to Google AdWords. So information is not research grade.
Many of the companies listed on this site undoubtedly posted their own reviews. There would have been negative comments otherwise. They didn’t comprehend business basics and were frustrated with even the most simple questions around fundamental procedures. I believe the sub-standard providers focused on servicing new operators who are unfamiliar with the car rental business process and therefore the proper verification questions to ask when looking for a management software. And because of this (software management systems being the foundation of the service offering of a car rental business operation), the initial poor understanding will of course continue, limiting chances of success.
A quick example to highlight my point above:
TSD, is without a doubt one of the credible car rental software solutions and was a top consideration on our list. They showed a one star rating on the Capterra site, while Easy Rent Pro and ASAP Rent, both weak softwares, hosted on fragile networks, had five star ratings each and difficult to believe glowing reviews.
I have re-categorized the Capterra Car Rental Software list of system providers, based on Suitability, Capability, Ease of Use, Reliability, Miscellaneous Advantages, Company History, etc..
You can click on this link: Car Rental Software Comparison and Reviews to get directly to my summary conclusions section.
1) Top Car Rental Software Providers (In Alphabetical Order):
2) Runners Up – Capable of Running Business with Some Compromises (In Alphabetical Order):
3) Generally Unsuitable:
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