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Arun Makhija, CEO with a company, despite travelling two-and-a-half hours from Noida to Gurugram to catch up with foreign delegates sitting in different time zones, was forced to get the meeting rescheduled due to traffic woes in rush hour. Then he learnt about the concept of ‘boardroom-on-wheels’, and embraced it.
Aditya Loomba, Founder, Eco Rent A Car, said his professional car rental and transportation company, is now getting an increasing number of requests from people like Makhija, who can rent a mini-van like a Toyota Ventury, with facilities such as a Wi-Fi zone, a plasma screen and projector, rotating seats and a mini bar, which helps these entrepreneurs conduct important meetings on the go.
“This concept is already quite popular in places such as Thailand, Malaysia and China, and is now gaining acceptance in India,” he told BusinessLine . The special vehicles are like business-class compartments in an aircraft. Eco Rent A Car, which introduced this concept in New Delhi last year, followed by Mumbai and Bengaluru, is all set to expand it to Hyderabad, Chennai and Goa in 2018, he said. “Ours is the only company to have introduced the concept in India.”
The company currently offers a Toyota Ventury, which is an eight-seater, multi-purpose car, on rental and lease basis. It also offers the Toyota Commuter for the same purpose, he said. Both these vehicles are imported from Thailand and Japan. The vehicle facilitates board meetings on wheels, as in a boardroom. “Corporate houses like Philips Electronics, banks and even embassy officials, are using the facility.”
Eco Rent A Car was founded by Adiya’s father, Captain Khem Raj Loomba, with three cars in 1974, after his retirement from the Indian Army. It turned into a private limited company in 1996 and now has around 3,000 vehicles and transports 20,000 passengers every day across nearly 60 cities in India. Incidentally, ECO in the company’s brandname stands for Emergency Commissioned Officer.
Loomba said the brick-and-mortar company is built on the part-owned/ part-aggregation model, with its proprietary technology and processes providing a user interface across mobile and Web platforms. It has also partnered the Haryana Government by signing an MoU to start women-based cab services in Gurugram.
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