Covid has wreaked havoc on the car rental market, but as we continue to claw out of lockdowns and more things are opening up, one contender seems to have taken a significant lead.
I'm not talking about one of the incumbents like Enterprise or Avis, nor Zipcar, the first rent-by-app company.
I'm talking about Turo, the Airbnb version of car rentals. Turo has secretly filed for an IPO this week, which lead me to look at its downloads. I looked at Turo a few months ago (and also analyzed its ASO), so I already had a feeling downloads are healthy.
But how do they compare to others in the industry?
I compared the downloads of the top car rental apps in the U.S., which include: Turo, Enterprise, Hertz, Avis, Zipcar, and Getaround, to see which one has the largest share. So far this year, the biggest winner is, without a doubt, Turo.
We estimate that in the U.S., Turo's downloads totaled 1.9M, between 1/1 and 8/11, and across both stores. The second most downloaded car rental app, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, saw 750K downloads in the same range, according to our estimates. That's almost a third! The next one down, Hertz, was downloaded 460K times according to our app intelligence. The remaining three, Avis, Zipcar, and Getaround, were in the 300K range.
Having used almost every one of those services, I know there are a few factors that play into success. Advertising and promotion being the most obvious, but size of network, user experience, and customer service are strong contenders as well.
Will a Turo IPO explode? It's too early to tell before we get to see more numbers, but of this group, I'm not at all surprised to see them try.
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