How to Develop a Car Rental App Like Turo?

Being one of the top-rated car rental applications, Turo, came into existence in the year 2009, witnessed approximately 1 cr+ downloads on the Google Play Store. It has also witnessed an overall 88% revenue increase between 2021 and 2023.

The above figure depicts the growing demand for car rental services. These services indeed offer vast opportunities for revenue generation. It prompts many businesses to make their way in this field and develop car rental app like Turo.

If you also wish to develop any such application, you are in the right place. In this post, you can explore relevant information regarding the development of a car rental app like none other than Turo! So, start reading.

Why Develop Car Rental App Like Turo?

Well, the development of a car rental application like Turol yields a plethora of advantages. It helps you grab by leaps and bounds of the growing market of car rental apps and discover various revenue-generation opportunities.

With car rental applications, users get the option to rent their preferred cars. They can deal directly with the owner of their selected car. It includes numerous features such as real-time availability, secure payments, insurance integration, and more. 

These work effectively to improve user experience and reliability. A car rental application discovers a plethora of opportunities for revenue generation. Be it listing fees, rentals, premium services, or others.

It also minimizes the operational costs when compared to traditional car rentals. On the other hand, users also get plenty of vehicles to rent with this application.

How does a Car Rental App like Turo Work?

A car rental application is the right place to allow car owners to connect with users who need their vehicle on a rental basis. The rental period tends to vary based on the actual needs of customers, ranging from a couple of hours to even several days.

Let’s get a detailed discussion of how this app functions;

For Users

• Users first need to download the application and then install it on their devices.
• Once they install the app successfully, they can create their account and enter their location to browse those available cars.
• Users can get a filter option to select the rental car based on price, type of car, and also its availability.
• Once they find their favorite rental car, they can book the same for the desired duration.
• The app can process the application and also insurance options that can be chosen during the booking.

For Car Owners

• Car owners can create a complete list of their vehicles by offering images, details, and pricing.
• They can also set their daily rates, availability, conditions, and more. After making a booking request completely, the host can decline or approve it. Turo provides complete insurance coverage for both guests and hosts. It ensures full protection, especially during the rental.

After completing the booking process, users can meet car owners for an important exchange or also use contactless entry features.

Once the completion of the rental duration, the car gets returned based on the agreed terms. Turo can also simplify car sharing by offering convenience, flexibility, and vehicle choices.

What Features a Car Rental App Should Have?

Since you seek to develop car rental app, you need to be familiar with several must-have features. The reason is features play a vital role to boost users experience and thus have a direct role in ensuring success of this app.

Let’s get a detailed overview of some of the must-have features for the said application.

1. Booking Management

When it comes to booking management, it’s a core feature of any car rental application. It makes the process of rental car booking more convenient and smooth. It facilitates users to browse various vehicles that are available for rental. They can choose the dates for booking and then complete the reservation process easily.

A perfect booking system should offer real-time availability of vehicles. It ensures customers can easily visualize which vehicles are available to hire at their selected period. The booking system should allow users to modify or even cancel their booking with minimum effort.

2. Car Management

Car management is quite necessary for any car rental app, be it for users or car owners. It allows customers to filter and select the vehicle based on the model, making size, or fuel efficiency.

For car rental businesses, car management includes several things such as vehicle status, monitoring, rental history, maintenance schedules, and more. The car rental application should ensure easy to add and remove vehicles from the inventory and also notify their staff, especially when cars are due for repair or service.

A real-time management feature is indeed necessary and ensures the availability of only reliable vehicles. It minimizes any possibility of breakdown and thus ensures complete safety for customers. This system can offer data on customer preferences, vehicle performance, operational efficiency, and more.

3. Advanced Search

Advanced search is important to match the needs of customers. So, make sure your car rental application boasts of this feature. Users should have the ability to refine their search by different conditions such as seating capacity, type of car, price range, transmission type, brand preferences, etc.

It’s advisable to include filter options such as ‘SUV’, Luxury, ‘eco-friendly’, and many more. These help users locate their preferred cars based on their actual requirements.

Make sure the advanced search option you include displays key details, car pictures, user reviews, etc. It helps users make the right decision accordingly.

4. Vehicle Tracking

Safety and accountability are highly important for rental vehicles. That’s the reason why a reliable vehicle tracking system is important. With this feature, customers and rental car companies can track the locations of vehicles in real-time with the use of GPS.

It keeps users stress-free, especially in cases where a vehicle tends to be delivered to any particular location. Vehicle tracking acts as a theft prevention for many car rental companies. It also offers full recovery while offering data on vehicle usage patterns.

After getting details of car locations, businesses find it easy to timely pick-ups and drop-offs. It’s indeed highly important to maintain efficiency and also to avoid any kind of delay.

5. Customized Rides

Personalization has become the most popular trend in almost every business sector. Car rental is indeed not an exception. So, make sure your car rental application offers a personalization option.

It should include the ability to customize a rental ride that can improve user experience. It also caters to various specific preferences of customers.

For instance, customers get an option to choose various add-ons including GPS devices, child seats, roadside assistance plans, and more. You can simplify the overall rental process by offering an insurance option. It also offers an extra convenience.

6. Cost Calculators

Transparency in price is something that is quite essential for a car rental application. You can include a cost calculator in your app to maintain transparency in price.

With the calculator, users can get a correct estimation of the overall rental price based on several factors like car type, rental duration, mileage, and also various additional services, and more.

The cost calculator that you include in your app should maintain accuracy and let your customers avoid any surprises or hidden fees at checkout. It improves overall reliability in the company.

The app should be able to offer numerous options such as digital wallets, debit/credit cards, pay-at-pickup options, etc. These are essential to make the process convenient as well as flexible.

7. Geo-Location Services

Make sure you integrate GPS technology into your application to offer a wide range of features, right from locating a nearby rental location to providing directions for vehicle drop-offs.

It can notify users about any discounts or promotions in their location area.

The application should have the capability of using geo-location data for offering real-time updates related to the time and location when the vehicle will come.

Users should get this information easily. Businesses can also use geo-location to offer pricing based on location. It should offer alternative vehicles according to the proximity of users.

Step-by-Step Process to Develop Car Rental App

Development of a car rental application requires a systematic process that includes numerous stages, from research to post-launch. Every step plays a crucial role in ensuring user-friendliness, functionality, and capability of the app. Let’s get a detailed overview of all those steps.

1. Research and Ideation

Before you proceed to build a car rental app, you need to first spend enough time researching. It’s mandatory to know about the market, target audience, competitors, and more.

Research also helps you know about the expectations of users from your applications. It also gives you an idea about which features should be included and what pain points for car owners and users to address.

With thorough research, you will get an understanding of trends. Ideation focuses on the way to make your app unique, either through pricing models, or features.

2. Define Feature

Features are important for any app. You should never be in a hurry while defining features for your car rental app. You can consider implementing the following features in your app;

• User Registration
• Profile Creation
• Car Listings
• Search Filters
• Booking and Scheduling
• Payment Gateway Integration
• Real-Time GPS and Tracking
• Push Notification
• Ratings and Reviews

3. Tech Stack Selection

Selection of the right tech stack is something that you can’t overlook while developing an advanced car rental application. The tech selection has a direct impact on the scalability, functionality, and also security of your application.

So, you should never take it lightly and can consider using the following options;

• You can leverage React Native, Flutter, and more when it comes to front-end development.
• You can leverage Node.js, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Django, and others for back-end development.
• Technologies like MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB are useful to create databases. 
• These are necessary to store user data.
• For cloud storage, you can use various technologies such as Google Cloud, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and more.
• For payment Gateway, you can consider implementing PayPal, Stripe, or many others for secured and varied payment options.
• For API, you can consider using Google Map APIs to track the location and availability of cars.   

4. Designing

During this phase, designers craft the UI/UX design of the app. They create a user-friendly interface that can offer an easy and smooth user experience. Designers create wireframes to get an idea of the visual appearance of the application.

They also create a prototype to define the flow. Designers keep in mind the most important factor ‘simplicity’ while creating a design. They design the app in a way to ensure its easy accessibility of various important features.

They optimize the design for different device users, whether they are desktop users, mobile users, tablet users, or others.

5. Development

The development step of a car rental application involves coding. It involves development of both back-end and front-end. Front-end developers are capable of making the interface fully interactive as well as responsive. Apart from this, the back-end team can manage servers, databases, and more.

6. Testing

Testing is necessary to check bugs or any errors in the newly developed car rental application. QA experts conduct testing of the app in different scenarios and under rigorous conditions. In case of any bug or error, the development team takes immediate action to resolve them.

7. Deployment

It’s the final step to launch the newly developed car rental application. Developers perform the submission of apps to the app stores. Indeed, they fulfill the necessary criteria to increase the chance of approval of the app.  

How Much Does it Cost to Develop a Car Rental App?

As far as the cost to develop a car rental app is concerned, it depends on the type of app you want to develop. For a basic app with limited and simple features, you need to spend a cost ranging from $30,000 to $40,000.

On the other hand, the cost of development of advanced rental apps with cutting-edge features can go up to even more than $150,000. Well, the cost of developing a rental application is certainly not fixed.

It tends to vary according to numerous factors like features, complexity, location of developers, and more. Besides, the app maintenance can increase the cost too..

Conclusion

So, above are the ways you can proceed with developing your Car rental app. It’s essential to have a rock-solid strategy before you proceed. You can implement it properly to proceed in the right direction. It’s indeed a good idea to stay in touch with a top car rental app development company that can ensure the success of your projects.

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