In April, Min and I packed a rack of flyers, a box of pens and two embroidered polos and flew to Las Vegas for the International Car Rental Show. It was Fleetwire’s first trade show, and our first time standing behind a table explaining what we’d built to a room full of people who rent cars for a living.
The show
ICRS is run by Auto Rental News, and the 2023 show (April 16–18) was at Paris Las Vegas. We stayed next door at Caesars. It was the show’s biggest turnout in over 20 years: about a thousand people, from single-location independents to franchise groups and suppliers from around the world.
We’d joined the American Car Rental Association a few weeks earlier, so our badges came with an “ACRA First Timer” ribbon. They picked up a little more flair, too.
Setting up booth #206
A 10×10 booth starts out as a pipe-and-drape frame, a black table and a sign with your company name on it. Ours ended up with two laptops running live demos, an iPad for signups, a stack of rack cards and our ACRA supporter sign.
Our neighbor at booth 204 was ACO Rent A Car, whose banner advertised Callidum car rental software, so for three days we demoed rental software right next to another rental software company. Walking the floor, we saw the rest of the field too: TSD, RENTALL and others who have served rental counters for years. Most of it was built for airport locations and franchise systems. Much less was built for the operator with eight cars, a Turo account and a website they want to take direct bookings on. That’s who we built Fleetwire for, and it was good to see that gap in person.
What operators asked us
“Does it work with Turo?” This was the first question at the booth, over and over. A lot of the operators we met run a mix of Turo trips and direct rentals, and they’re tired of keeping two calendars in sync by hand. Fleetwire syncs Turo trips into the same calendar as direct bookings, so a car booked in one place is blocked everywhere else.
“What about tolls?” Close behind. Every operator has a story about a toll bill that showed up weeks after the car came back, and the work of matching it to the right renter. We’d already built toll automation into Fleetwire, and it was clear from these conversations how much time it can save.
“How do you check ID and insurance?” Operators want to know who’s driving before the keys leave the lot. Many were still collecting photos of licenses and insurance cards over text and checking them by eye. We showed how Fleetwire builds ID verification into the booking, and heard plenty about how much more operators want automated.
“Any insurance tips?” We didn’t expect this one, but it came up often, especially from smaller operators. Coverage is one of the hardest parts of renting cars outside the big brands. The answer we kept giving: know what your policy covers when a renter’s own insurance doesn’t, and make checking a renter’s coverage part of every booking, not something you do when there’s a problem.
Our favorite conversations were with operators who’d sit down for a demo and say some version of “this actually looks modern.” Much of the software on the floor had been around for a long time, and it showed. What really landed, though, was that Fleetwire wasn’t built by people guessing what operators need. I run a Tesla rental fleet myself, and I built Fleetwire to run it. Every feature in the demo is one I use every week.
Sessions and speed networking
Between expo hours, the show ran education sessions and a speed-networking round in the main ballroom. When the screens say “Rotate!”, you move to the next table and start over.
The people we met
The best part of the show wasn’t the booth. It was everyone we ran into between the booths.
- MooveTrax. Vijay Ramnarine, who builds GPS trackers for rental cars, left his card at our table. We caught up with him in person later.
- Axle. We ran into Cam from Axle in the hallway during a break. We swapped contacts by scanning the contact card in his phone app, and set up a meeting after the show. Axle verifies a renter’s insurance by connecting to their insurance account, exactly the check operators told us they were doing by hand.
- GMI Insurance. We’d been working with David Bond by email for a while. ICRS was the first time we met in person, at the GMI booth.
- Toll management. Toll-management folks stopped by to ask about integrating with Fleetwire. At the time we were building our own toll automation in-house, so we compared notes.
- 2Hire. We met the 2Hire team, who work on connected-car technology for fleets.
What we’re taking home
Three days of conversations gave us a clear list for the rest of 2023:
- Keep making Turo and direct bookings feel like one business. Operators don’t want to choose between the marketplace and their own website. They want both in one place.
- Move ID and insurance checks into the booking. Verifying a renter should happen before pickup, automatically, not over text messages at the counter.
- Keep chipping away at the back office. Tolls, reminders and paperwork are where small operators lose their evenings. Every hour we automate is an hour back for running the fleet.
- Come back. One booth taught us more about our customers than months of emails. We’ll be at more shows.
If you stopped by booth #206, thank you. If you didn’t, come say hi:
