The demand of car on rentals (both short term & long run) has been increased for the last few years. At the same time, a steadily increasing rate of mobile apps usage has been noted as well.
Therefore, creating a mobile app for car rental business does make complete sense for a car hire business growth.
For any car rental business, who wish to develop their mobile application, it’s important that they must specify all of the essential features that their app must have, before they hire a mobile app developer.
In this blog post, we we will be covering 7 such important elements that shouldn’t be missed out while developing a car hire mobile app.
#1 Inventory Management
Managing a few cars is not that complex as compared to managing the inventory of large number of cars. Therefore, your mobile application must be able to provide you with a solid inventory management system.
Especially, if you have multiples locations, inventory management feature on your app will definitely save your time as well as any possibility of human error.
In the absence of an inventory management, your customers may book a car that has been already booked by other customer for the same date and time. This may result in frustration & hassles from your side and customers side as well.
#2 Booking Engine
A booking engine is the backbone of any car rental mobile application.
Here are but some of the features of an efficient booking engine:
A. Ability for the users to select the preferred date and time of pickup & drop-off seamlessly.
B. Ability for the users to see & confirm a booking preview with all of the information selected and added by them before they proceed ahead to make a payment.
#3 Robust Search
It’s a well known rule in any business that you give your customers what they want and in return they will give you what you want.
The customers who wish to book a car on rent, would always like to perform a search for their desired car segment based on their preferences.
Therefore, it becomes very important for you to let them search based on the keywords that your customers key-in.
#4 Push Notification
A push notification is one of the best & effective marketing tools that every mobile application must have.
A mobile push notification feature helps you to send out special offers or new arrival messages to your potential customers.
#5 Instant Booking Confirmation
In order to assure your customers that their bookings have been confirmed, it’s mandatory to send out a booking confirmation email to them immediately after they make the payment.
In the absence of instant confirmation, your customers may feel lost and try to contact you over phone or email in order to make sure that their booking has been successfully executed.
Therefore, in order to save your customers from all these hassles, an instant booking confirmation feature is a must required feature for your mobile application.
#6 Auto-Responder With Invoice
There are many websites and mobile apps that do not send out an invoice instantly to the customers upon making the payments.
Personally, I feel annoyed when after paying for any service, all that I receive is a confirmation line and no invoice.
For a seamless experience of your users, it’s essential that you send out an invoice as an attachment via an email.
You may want to raise or reduce your usual price based on the volume of demand during certain months or weeks.
Therefore, you must request your mobile app builder to provide you with a flexible pricing system that you can use and slash down the prices of some of the cars or all of them for certain period of time.
