Olacabs started as a result of our personal frustration with car rentals. We had been through a very bad experience and wanted to start a company to provide a great experience to travellers. We initially assumed that the biggest problem would be to enable online advance bookings for car rentals, which have been till now sourced and booked offline. It turned out that customers were very willing to pay online and drivers were also happy that they were getting additional bookings. As we moved along and served more customers, we realized that a car rental experience goes much beyond just booking the car. And to stay true to our goal of providing the best customer experience, we had to move beyond just providing a booking platform to ensuring the end-to-end experience is awesome! As the Tony Hsieh book inspired title of this post says, we’re “Delivering Happiness”!

Car rentals is inherently a very different product as compared to other transportation services like bus, flights etc. It’s a very personal product. The driver is the only person interacting with the traveller and his quality becomes essential to a great customer experience. You might never blame makemytrip for delayed departures, may or may not blame redbus for bus quality but will always blame Olacabs if your car rental experience is below expectations!

Also, customer expectations vary wildly. Some travellers will be happy if they get a clean car, well behaved driver on time to their pickup point. Others want specific requests like does your car have a video screen, carrier etc! And others will be put off if the driver doesn’t know even the smallest nook and corner of the city!

We’re working hard to provide a great end-to-end experience. We now audit each car we bring onto our platform and train our partner drivers in customer service. We’re also ensuring we are totally transparent with the traveller and there is seamless information flow between us and the traveller, be it about features of the car, availability, status etc.

We’ve had wonderful customers who have tried us out in our early days and given us very valuable feedback that has helped us improve the experience. A big thank you to you guys!