How to Build a Car Rental app Like Hertz and Enterprise?

Now, if we combine this data with an ongoing mobile economy trend, we can draw quite a simple conclusion: your business will benefit from both trends if you build a Car Rental App. Furthermore, it becomes even more appealing when you find out that the development itself doesn’t involve many resources and can ensure a high ROI.

Let’s take a closer look at the options that you have.
/
/

🗂 2 Car Rental App Development Approaches for Startups and SMEs

When preparing this article, we kept in mind 2 types of key personas that can benefit the most from making a mobile App for Car Rental Business. Nevertheless, we fully acknowledge that these are generic cases and the reality is much more diverse than black & white. So, in case you have some other business model, feel free to reach out to us to ask more specific questions. Surely, you can apply most of the information we talk about to your use case.

• A Startup. You may aim at building an Aggregator (usually relies on the B2C business model; a single platform that bands together a few car rental providers), a Peer-to-Peer Agency (works in the C2C segment; users lend their vehicles to other users); Or maybe you know how to disrupt the existing markets and have a completely new Car Rental business model in mind?
• A Business Owner who already provides car rental services — either B2B or B2C — through a website.

Your Business Background and Product Vision will determine the optimal way to make up the list of vehicles for your future Car Rental mobile App. Let me explain.

Based on the Product Strategy, your App Development Agency will create an appropriate Roadmap of the Project and define the Backlog of work for your MVP together with the shareholders.

It’s also important to review the core features of the Car Rental mobile App MVP since they, after all, define how the product will be developed — timeframes, correct development stack and tools, a decent estimate etc. But of course, the Scope heavily depends on your exact Product Strategy and should be defined after a Discovery stage with your selected Tech-Partner.
/
/

📲 What Features Should Be in Your Car Rental Mobile App?

As true admirers of the Lean Methodology, where main goal is creating value, we normally recommend our clients to start with an MVP.

One of the trickiest tasks at this stage is to correctly determine the right Release-Backlog which means creating an App-Product with only those features, which will solve the problem of your Target Audience (TA). This is important to cut Time-to-Market and iterate while you finally found Product-Market Fit.

Let’s think about the steps that your TA takes on the way from an interested user to a paying customer and learn how to guide them along this journey with the help of in-app features.
/
/

# 1: Search

It’s important to ensure an intuitive flow for your users that will solve their problems and, on the other hand, bring revenue to you. Therefore, they should be guided from their very first interaction with your mobile application.

From the development perspective, it’s possible to create a Car Rental App with 3 searching approaches:

1. Users can enter the pick-up location manually.
2. The application is allowed to use geolocation services and relies on the user’s current position.
3. The car station can be picked up on an interactive built-in map.

⚙️ Tech Stack that You Might Need to Make a Car Rental App

The success of your Project greatly depends on the Tech Stack. Usually, it’s the CTO’s task to pick up the right dev tools that will help your In-House or Remote Team to create a Car Rental App. However, here are a few ideas to consider from the Stormotion Development Squad (as we’re usually acting as a CTO for our clients):

1. To handle payments, we recommend using Braintree SDK or Stripe API.
2. Firebase SDK is one of the best tools so far used by our team to implement Push Notifications.
3. If you’re planning to develop a Car Rental App like Rentalcars (a mobile aggregator) it’s possible to use, for instance, Europcar, Hertz, Avis, Alamo, Thrifty APIs to integrate their car databases.
4. Google Maps Platform Tools is necessary if you want to integrate maps into your application.
5. We recommend building the app using React Native. This will allow building a cost-effective cross-platform app with native UX.

To calculate the price we used the average hourly rate for Eastern Europe - $40/hour. However, the price (and the needed time as well) may greatly vary on many factors. So if you want to get a more accurate estimate for your project, drop us a line!

After asking some details and going throught the Project Discovery Stage we'll be able to give you a more precise estimate of costs develop a car rental app.
/
/

💡 Takeaways

It seems now we’ve shared most of the useful insights to build a Car Rental App for your Startup or Business. Of course, there’s a lot more to the development than what we’ve talked about in the article, however, it significantly depends on your specific use case:

1. Define core elements of the future Digital Product: your target audience, their pain points, and your offered solution. Also, your USP and monetization model are essential things to think about.
2. Find an App Dev Agency that will help to create a PoC for you, prepare an Estimate and go through the Discovery Phase to pick up an appropriate Tech Stack & create the Roadmap.
3. Develop an MVP and bring it to the market. Check if your Product solves the pain of your audience and whether they are ready to pay for your product.
4. Iterate with your Tech-Partner till you have found a Product-Market fit.
5. Found it? Now it’s time to pitch it to the investors and secure additional funding for the further development and growth of your Startup.

Have any questions on how to develop a car rental app like Hertz, Turo or Rentalcars for your own business? Or you need a reliable Tech-Partner who will craft a Scalable Digital Product with you and help to skyrocket it? Push the button below, and we’ll help you get things done!