Online car firm active in every airport worldwide

4 Sep 2008

A Dublin-based online car firm that handles bookings in over 17,000 locations has struck a major deal with one of Europe’s largest low-cost airline carriers Norwegian.com.

CarTrawler began life in 2004 as Arguscarhire.com operating out of Dublin airport and headed by Greg Turley. In 2006, the company added 65 jobs based on the phenomenal growth of its online car hire business and the technology it developed around it.

Norwegian.com will use CarTrawler’s distribution system and its Koios revenue management tools to seamlessly offer car rental from all the top European car hire brands in an unbiased display and within the air booking process.

“CarTrawler’s ability to integrate car rental content from a long list of top quality car hire companies – seamlessly – into all our passenger touch points will deliver a significant boost to our non-air revenue,” explained Norwegian.com sales director, Lars Sande.

In three years, CarTrawler has signed a total airline passenger audience of over 120 million passengers every year, making it one of the largest provider of car rental booking technologies in the world.

The company provides real-time access to pricing, availability and bookings to over 450 car hire suppliers in 134 countries, effectively covering every major and regional airport and city location worldwide.

“Our experience, and that of our many airline partners, is that choice as well as effective implementation yields better revenue per passenger than any single supplier solution in the industry today,” said CarTrawler’s chief technology officer, Bobby Healy.

“Norwegian.com is a major European airline, and with eight million passengers predicted for 2008, we expect to see car rental add real uplift to bottom line revenues,” Healy added.

By John Kennedy

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com