Turo, the Airbnb of cars, allows private car owners to rent out their vehicles either online or via a mobile app. Turo CEO Andre Haddad” says that business is booming and that people renting their cars for short durations are making as much as $10,000 a year.
Not surprisingly, rental companies hate Turo according to Haddad, “The rental car companies, in particular, Enterprise, do not like Turo. Of course, they don’t like more competition that comes into their marketplace.”
Andre Haddad, CEO of Turo, describes the growth of the company, the process to rent your car, and the challenges they are facing from regulators and rental car companies in an interview today on CNBC:
How to Rent Your Car on Turo
You create your listing after you create an account and you take some photos of your car. You add a description, put in your address and you’ve got a listing that’s live on our app. We help you find the right price for your car and we help you decide where your availability is. At that point, you’ve got a listing that’s up and coming and you start getting trips that will be booked on your vehicle.
10 Million Users, 350,000 Vehicles, Up to $10K a Year
There are almost 300 million cars in the US and they’re idle most of the time. We now have 10 million users on the app around 350,000 vehicles have been listed so you can absolutely list your car and rent it out every day if you want. For my 911 I’ve been sharing it on Turo for the last five years and I’ve roughly made $10,000 a year by sharing it. My daily price is around $200 a day and people book it for a day or two or three days and sometimes for long trips.
You have to have some time set aside to meet your guests when they come in to pick up your car. You use the app to check-in your guests; take photos of the vehicle from the exterior and interior, capture a photo of the odometer, and gas or battery charge. Once you’ve done that process through the app, which takes a few minutes at the beginning of the trip, you can hand over the keys to your guests and then off they go. When they return it you do the same sort of process with the app to check out the guests.
Insurance Coverage Protects the Renter
We have a great insurance policy with Liberty Mutual which has been our insurance partner for the last several years. Liberty provides great coverage for both the host car owner as well as the guests, a million dollar liability policy as well as physical damage protection to the vehicle with no deductibles for the host.
The only thing that we required from our host is to make sure that they document the state of the car at the beginning of the trip as well as the end of the trip so that we can compare photos and be able to see where there’s been damage and then Liberty Mutual processes that claim. It’s usually something that we deal with over a couple days and it works reasonably well for the vast majority of our guests and our hosts.
Rental Companies Hate Turo
A lot of car enthusiasts are sharing their cars on Turo because they sort of trust one another as well as trust the platform. The average host on Turo makes around $625 a month so that’s enough money to be able to pay for your car. The weekend is definitely most popular, the travel times, the end of the year, holidays, the summer months, those are our peak times. During those months our hosts are making thousands of dollars a month.
The rental car companies, in particular, Enterprise, do not like Turo. Of course, they don’t like more competition that comes into their marketplace. They’re trying to tell everyone that competition is bad and that we should be regulated as if we were a rental car company.
We’re trying to educate regulators and airports and everyone that this is a new model and that it’s a model that makes a ton of sense when you think about all of the billions of dollars there are invested in cars that are currently underutilized and wasting money on a daily basis. Think about the depreciation on all of the cars out there.