Rent-A-Car announced the completion of tens of millions of dollars in Series D financing to prepare for the post-pandemic global travel market

On April 20, the global self-driving tour platform Rent-A-Car announced the completion of tens of millions of dollars in Series D financing. Rent-a-car said that this round of financing funds will be used to strengthen product research and development, supplement the global operation team, expand the domestic market, improve customer service capabilities and other fields, in order to provide more customers with a more perfect product and service experience.

Rent-a-car is China's leading global self-driving travel platform, with business covering nearly 200 countries and regions, more than 6,000 cities and 200,000 stores around the world, providing users with international car rental, domestic car rental, attraction tickets, local play products, free Chinese GPS, 7x24 hours global Chinese and English customer service, insurance and other self-driving travel related services. So far, renting a car has accompanied more than 30 million Chinese tourists to enjoy a worldwide self-driving tour with ease.

Adhere to the outbound business and open up the domestic market

The pandemic is a litmus test of whether a company's operations are anti-fragile. When businesses are exposed to volatility, randomness, chaos and stress, risk and uncertainty, they are able to thrive and thrive.

Since its establishment in 2011, it has been focusing on the rental car in the outbound self-driving market of Chinese people, adhering to the outbound business after the outbreak of the epidemic, continuing to provide car rental services for a small number of outbound people, and working with overseas car dealers to seek new development to overcome difficulties. For example, in some small and medium-sized car shops in the Asia-Pacific and European regions, 80% to 90% of the users are Chinese outbound consumers, and the outbreak of the epidemic has caused these car dealers to suddenly cut off the "grain". In the case of a sharp decrease in customers in China, on the one hand, rent-a-car provides free system support for car dealers to help them optimize the management and deployment of vehicles and release greater capacity. On the other hand, one-on-one rental car rental helps it to launch international stations, optimize the store service process, accurately attack in the face of different national markets, and stimulate leasing marketing strategies for car dealers to output a series of stimulus, helping them to increase their operating income. With the help of renting a car, many Chinese car dealers have grown into a local international car dealership under the epidemic and gradually tided over the difficulties.

In terms of international business, renting and renting a car always pays attention to the dynamics of the overseas epidemic situation, keenly captures the positive impact of the relaxation of overseas epidemic policies on travel, optimizes overseas market strategies, and enables the company's overseas business to quickly recover to the pre-epidemic period. Due to the different language systems and epidemic prevention policies of different countries, in order to more quickly keep up with market changes and changes in consumer trends, the international business team is organized and agile, and agile groups are established for different countries, different regions and different policies, and personalized operation strategies are formulated, and support car dealers with operational difficulties. For example, under the guidance of renting and renting, some car dealers in Australia, Thailand, New Zealand and the United States have implemented interface optimization and capacity allocation between multiple cities in China, helping car dealers to turn losses into profits in a short period of time. At the same time, the international business team of rent-and-car rental actively seeks organizational system reform, optimizes the team structure, and cultivates a large number of cross-functional compound talents for the company, laying the foundation for the comprehensive recovery of international business.

In terms of domestic business, at the beginning of the epidemic, rental car rental resolutely changed the focus of operation and laid out the domestic market. In the first quarter of 2020, when the epidemic was the worst, the rental car gathered a "tough iron army" of 100 people within the company to expand the cooperative car dealership in layered and zoned areas nationwide. With nearly 10 years of experience in overseas car dealership operations, the team has completed the signing of nearly 3,000 domestic car dealers in just less than 4 months, covering more than 600 large, medium, and small cities and regions across the country. At the same time, rent-a-car successfully transplants international service products, experience and concepts to the scene of domestic car rental self-driving tours, improves the application of data technology, actively collects feedback from the market, listens to the voices of consumers, and promotes the rapid iterative upgrading of domestic products and services. Since its launch, the compound growth rate of the domestic car rental business has exceeded 470%, ranking first in the domestic mainstream car rental platform, and rental car rental has also rapidly grown into a self-driving travel platform that truly covers the global market.

Enrich the tourism ecology and forge the combat effectiveness of the organization

During the epidemic period, we have actively promoted ecological cooperation, and have successively reached cooperation with leading enterprises in different fields such as Fliggy Travel, China Mobile Worry-free Travel, and Ping An of China, and improved the global self-driving tour service system covering models, insurance, value-added and after-sales service.

Not only that, in recent years, rent-a-car has continued to optimize the team structure, practice internal skills, consolidate basic capabilities, advocate people to make full use of their talents, encourage employees to actively innovate, explore and explore feasible business value-added directions, and create a talent team that can "fight a hard battle and be good at winning the war" for business development, and create a stable operating environment for rental and car rental in the epidemic. At the same time, it also lays a good foundation for the rapid resumption of outbound business and multi-habitat development after the epidemic, and the improvement of the new self-driving travel ecology with car rental as the core service scenario.

Since its inception, rental car has been pursuing long-termism, and now successfully completed the D round of financing, so that rental car has more resources to polish products, meet user needs, improve user experience, help rental car rental to be able to cross the cycle, achieve long-term growth, but also inject a shot in the arm for the tourism industry.

The market demand for self-driving tours has increased sharply, and technology has helped "value upgrading"

With the development of the tourism industry, tourism behavior has also evolved from sightseeing to vacation and leisure, and changes in tourism behavior have also made major changes in the supply and allocation of tourism elements. Taking self-driving travel as an example, people's attention to the hygiene, disinfection, safety, independence, comfort and other aspects of tourism products has increased, providing development momentum for the self-driving travel market, and safer, more private and more flexible travel services such as self-driving will also become the main theme of the future tourism market.

Despite the huge market demand, the exploration of the self-driving car rental industry is still on the rise. How to make the operation more standardized and efficient at the same time, but still be able to continue to attract customers, rent-a-car co-founder Li Bin said that systematic service capabilities are very important, coupled with the self-driving tour has a "fever" attribute, once "into the pit" will continue to be attractive. Not only that, different itineraries will also lead to the upgrading of users' consumption tendencies, such as the continuous iteration from trying 200 yuan of entry-level models to more than 600 yuan of high-end models.

As the core entry point of the travel scene, car rental has moved from satisfying the curiosity to the direction of starting from the user's point of view and tapping the deep demand of the market. In recent years, renting and renting a car has been upgraded through the use of digital technology to upgrade the self-driving travel value chain. Not only through digital technology to provide new services for vehicle suppliers and consumers, but also through the integration of tourism resources, revitalization of idle resources, improve the total factor productivity of self-driving car rental, in order to drive the self-driving car rental industry in an all-round way transformation and upgrading.

For future expectations, Li Bin, co-founder of rent-a-car rental, said that the blizzard of the epidemic will always slowly pass, and only "anti-freeze" enterprises can survive. The essence of "antifreeze" is: "First, in the face of market changes, whether the product is really excellent, and second, whether the team and service are really for the sake of consumers." In the future, rent-a-car will, as always, maintain its original intention, reach global users with unique service advantages and innovative capabilities, continuously deepen the creation of a global self-driving ecological chain, continue to provide users with a new experience of self-driving tourism, and strive to become a world-class self-driving travel platform. ”