Car Rental Mobile App Development: Features, Timeline, Cost and Tech Stacks

The car rental industry is rising on high tides of growth. It has witnessed a huge growth in past few years. Let’s see what has given such rise to this industry and how can you also own an app for your car rental business.

So, first thing first,

What exactly is Car Rental Mobile App?

Taking a car rental service through an online platform basically an app or leveraging for on demand car rental services are things that come under broader category of Car Renting Mobile App Services.

Gone are the days when we have to stand for hours waiting for the car service or the daily issues of busy parking lots. The technological advancement in this field has provided a new way to deal with the things. The only required thing is the payment of the required fare without any hidden fee and then you can enjoy the ride at your comfort.

However, going through the statistics, the car rental industry is resonating now. A research conducted by Allied and Zion Market Research estimates this car rental market to scale up from $60-80 billion in 2015 to approximately $125-160 billion in 2022, reaching a CAGR of 12.5%.

Biz4Group offers innovative and unique Car Rental App Development Service to serve the business needs of your organization. Apart from being user-friendly, these applications can also be run efficiently and a collaboration of website and your car rental application will serve you with high profits. This in-turn will also extend your reach to customers.

Proven Benefits of Using a Car Rental App

• It provides you with the ease to deliver cars at your doorsteps instead of you going to places and making payments manually. We at Biz4Group deliver you with the inbuilt feature of choosing the location by the user. The user can choose any location to pick and drop. This feature enables user to save time as compared to the former method of going to a location and taking the ride.

• This also removes the hectic paperwork that was done initially. Now, as the things will be managed by the App, so you can directly register in the app and start your ride.

• Not only cash, but App also features the online mode of transaction. This enables a smoother payment method and with the cashless transaction you can make payment anytime and anywhere.

• It also provides you with the easy and free cancellation of the ride; say you have a change in your plan at the last moment. It gives you the authority to cancel the ride, anytime and anywhere.

• The online transactions which you made are through your device and thus provide you with the complete payment history. It also provides you with the estimated fair at the start of the booking which is transparent and free of any hidden charges.

Now, we are very well aware of the terminology, know the benefits also but to build a Car Rental App, what are the features one should encapsulate? Well, not to worry on that part as well, here we provide you with all the must have features in your Car Rental Mobile App;

Features in a Car Rental Mobile App

At Customer’s End

Customers are and would always be the prime focus of any business. So we must take care of the needs and utilities at customers end.

• Login Panel; this could be the first interaction of user with your mobile App, so this must be taken care of. The end user, may or may not be tech-savvy, considering this, the login panel should be made agile and should not go into much technical aspects rather provide a smooth login either by email or by social media platforms.

• Selection of Car; Giving user the ease of selecting a Car would let him drive the car of his choice rather than going for a random car.

• Scheduling the Ride as per user’s comfort; It may happen many a times that user may have to leave for early morning to a meeting or may arrive from somewhere in the late night. So, pre-scheduling of a ride gives user a sense of comfort and he feels relaxed.

• Cost Estimation; as cost is an important factor when it comes to renting a car, so it should be made clear with a total estimation of the ride.

• Navigation and Live Tracking; this too is among the must have features, it enables user to track the live location of the Car whether he is waiting for it or is availing ride. It saves time and let’s user to change the route as per his convenience.

• Multiple Payment Options; a user may go for payment via cash or by the digital payments option, in the latter case he should have the options to choose from various digital transaction platforms.

• Rewards, Referrals and Loyalty Bonuses; you must take care of your existing and new customers in various ways; one such is fetching them with Bonuses and Rewards. This will help your business grow and at the same time make the existing customers more loyal to your brand.

• Push Notifications; the customers attached with your brand should be made aware of the campaigns and important updates related to App. So, by the feature of push notification, you can easily let him know of these updates.

Features at Driver’s End

It is the second most important panel to be taken care of, it consists of;

• Login; apart from user’s end, at drivers end also login panel is of utmost importance. Here also it should be easy to login either with the help of email or any social media handles without much technicalities.

• Notifications of Requested Rides; the driver should be able to check the notifications regarding the ride requests made by the user. So that he can accept the ride that suits him.

• Payment; it gives a payment interface at the driver’s end and thus provides a sync between user and driver when the transaction is made.

• Feedback; this section enables driver to see the feedbacks given by the user and can improve his service accordingly.

• Driver’s Dashboard; it features all the rides of the day, the payment he has received for the day, the feedbacks and much more. It provides a centralized portal for the driver to access all his information at one go.

• Navigation; this at drivers end lets him to see the live location of the user and where is his destination. Because of the navigation feature only, driver gets the exact pick and drop location of the user.

Features at the Admin End

It is the third important pillar of the Car Rental App. It encapsulates the whole detail of the driver as well as user and tracks them both, maintains a record of rides and looks for scope of improvement where needed with following features;

• Dashboards; this feature enables Admin to monitor the data analytics of the whole app at one place.

• User Management; it helps admin in managing the drives, all the drivers and the customers who are either taking a ride or are ordering a ride.

• Fare Management; admin can as well maintain a track record of fares for a period of time, and then can increase or decrease it as per the demand and supply in a location.

• Manage Fleet; this option enables admin to manage the car fleets from anywhere and lets him monitor about the location and the activities of the Car.

Tech Stack that you will Need to Make a Car Rental App

With all the benefits and features in hand, the success of your Car Rental App depends at large on the Tech-Stacks applied. This job to pick-up the right tools is the job of CTO who will not only monitor but help your In-House or Remote Team to develop the app. Biz4Group comes here with several ideas to help your development squad;

• To handle and manage payments, we recommend using Braintree SDK or Stripe API.

• Firebase SDK is one of the best tools so far used by our team to implement Push Notifications.

• If you want to integrate car databases, you can use, for instance, Europcar, Hertz, Avis, and Alamo to develop a Car Rental App like Rental cars, which is a mobile aggregator.

• One of the most significant tasks of your application is integration of maps and for this Google Maps Platform can be a suitable tool.

• We generally recommend developing the app using React Native, which will allow you to build a cost-effective cross-platform app with native UX.

Cost to Build a Car Rental App

As we have gone through the wholesome analysis of the required factors to build the Car Rental App, we have reached at the final step i.e. the Cost required to build the app.

Now, you may require developing an app either for native or cross platform app development depending on your requirements. So, the complete process can be integrated into several parts that start from computing the number of hours required. And in addition to the cost of the features, the cost of in-house developers, analytics support, customer service specialists, mobile network providers, etc. is also needed to be considered into records.

Key- Takeaways

It seems like you’ve got all the know-hows to build a Car Rental App for your business. We at Biz4Group would recommend you to organize the whole process in the following way:

• Make sure to define the core elements of the future digital product: consider your target audience, their problems, and your solution for that problem. Also, your USP and Monetization model.

• Find an App Dev Agency that will help create PoC for you, prepare an Estimate and go through the Discovery Phase to pick up the best Tech Stack & Create the Roadmap.

• Bring your developed MVP to the market. Check if your product provides solution to the issues of your audience and whether they are also ready to pay for your market.

• Iterate with your partner, the required specifications, till you have found a Product-Market fit.

Biz4Group is a leading mobile app development company. We have the proven track record and vast experience in carpooling mobile application development, our developers can build a peer to peer car rental app. So, if you need a reliable Tech-Partner who can craft a Scalable Digital Product with you and help to skyrocket it? Push the button below, and we’ll help you get things done!