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Savaari Car Rentals, an online firm which offers long-distance services, is charting out aggressive expansion plans.
The company offers its services in 60 cities currently. Gaurav Agarwal, Founder of Savaari, said the company will expand its services to 15 more cities in the next 15 months.
Agarwal said, “We are connected with most of the airports in the country and a partnership with an airline will be an added advantage.” He added that the company aims to target OTAs (Online Travel Aggregators) in coming months so that people can also avail a cab or taxi while booking their air, bus or train tickets. About 35 per cent of its car bookings are done online and the balance via phone.
Long-distance outstation trips and local half-day/full-day bookings are the company’s core business operandi.
According to Agarwal, long distance makes up for 85 per cent of Rs 30,000-crore car rental market. Carzonrent is another player in this segment. Savaari says that it plans to tap emerging cities such as Pune, Hyderabad, Indore, among others.
For Savaari, most of its business comes from corporate firms. It has over 500 corporate clients and the base is growing fast.
The company claims to have done about 72,000 transactions so far.
“We are looking at double-digit growth in terms of revenues this year and might be able to break even in another two years. We are growing at a pace of 300-400 per cent annually,” Aggarwal said. He also added that the company might look at raising funds in another six months.
Aggarwal said that garage-to-garage is a profitable venture compared with point-to-point model, operated by firms such as Olacabs, Meru, or Tabcab as the margins are less in the latter. He also added that point-to-point has issues related to licenses and is also a very saturated market, which is not the case with rent-a-car model.
The company has a network of 100 operators and 3,000-plus cars and plans to add another 1,000 cars. The company is also looking at launching a mobile application called ‘driver app’ for vendors.
The app will also facilitate instant billing for local and outstation trips, along with toll charges, parking fees and state taxes on a pan-India basis.
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