Summer is finally here, and with it, something many of us have been missing for the last few years. Travel!
Car rental via app has been around for a long time thanks to pioneers like Zipcar but really started taking off just a few short years ago. In Q2 of 2022, downloads hit a new all-time high, beating the previous all-time high set all the way back in 2019.
I added up the downloads of the leading car rental apps in the US, which include popular names such as Avis, Hertz, Enterprise, Budget, and SIXT, and also mixed in app-only platforms Zipcar, Getaround, and Turo. Together, the group saw a total of 2.7 million new downloads in Q2 in the US, according to our estimates.
Turo was, by far, the most in-demand option, earning roughly a third of all downloads after seeing downloads double quarter over quarter.
Turn is a service that lets car owners, usually of higher-end and exotic types, rent their cars out to app users (aka. strangers) for short periods. Very different than the traditional car rental model. Getaround does something similar but for regular cars and is also one of the top downloads of this group.
Are traditional car rental companies obsolete? Not yet, but having used both in the recent past, I prefer the non-traditional option for its simplicity and speed. I expect more people to do that in the future, forcing traditional rental companies to evolve.
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