Car rental needs to change

A couple of days ago I arrived back in San Francisco

I’m here after visiting customers in New Zealand and Hawaii (with a little bit of vacation time to stock-up on Hawaiian shirts).

It’s my second time in San

Francisco in the last couple of months. In mid-February I was here as part of the world’s first TedX talk in the sky – Qantas invited myself and 5 other Australian entrepreneurs to be part of the trip along with 4 TedX speakers.

In-flight we took over business class in the nose of the plane (think brain-controlled robots and roving camera crews) and once on the ground we got to learn from one another as we spent time at Google, Facebook, Twitter, Singularity University and others.

Face-to-face with self-driving cars

Touring these companies with such an inspiring group of people was bound to lead to a heap of new thoughts – any for me many of them relate to car rental. Seeing self-driving cars at the Googleplex is a great indicator of where the industry is going, while the ubiquity of Uber and Lyft in SF is a constant reminder of how quickly the taxi industry was disrupted.

The car rental experience needs to change

The customer experience of car rental needs to change. Either car rental companies will make this change or they will be disrupted by new players in the market. Car rental companies will face fierce new competition in the same way that taxi companies have.

At Carcloud we’re here to support car rental companies and are developing new technologies to change the way people rent cars. We’re giving every car rental company access to a level of technology that was previously only available to well-funded startups.

Meet Carcloud at the International Car Rental Show

For those of you attending the International Car Rental Show in Las Vegas this month, drop by our stand and I look forward to sharing some of our plans with you.