1car1 UK Car Rental News

Anyone who is a regular visitor to 1car1.com will undoubtedly have noticed that the site has undergone an extensive overhaul in the past few months with changes and improvements in a number of areas.

The most obvious change has been a complete redesign of the layout and user interface for the site. Having recently undergone a re branding exercise and adoption of a new logo, we felt it was important to incorporate this into the site. The result of this is the site that you see now.

Less obvious but equally important additions to the site include improved functionality in a number of areas, particularly the personal details section. You can now perform a variety of actions that were not previously available. These include the following:

• Save a quote. – You can now proceed through the quotation process and save details of your quote so that you can go away and look at prices and then come back and make a booking without having to re-enter all of your hire details.
• Print confirmations – You can now log into the site and reprint confirmations to ensure that you have the proper documentation when taking collection of your vehicle.
• Cancel bookings – Where you would previously have had to contact us by email or telephone, you can now cancel reservations online.
• Summary of booking details – You can now view a summary of information relating to your 1car1 rentals. This includes information such as total spent, total hire days and average rental cost.

Perhaps the most important change has been a fundamental recoding of back end infrastructure of the site. Over the past 3 years, we have seen a consistent increase in volume of visitors to 1car1.com and we came to a point early last year where we had hit maximum capacity and just couldn’t cope with any more traffic. The new site has been built with extensibility as the most prominent requirement and should be able to handle as much traffic as we can possibly throw at it.

As a company who has a strong sense of pride in our online presence, this has obviously been an exciting few months for us and there has been a flood of internal requests and observations as to how the previous site might be improved upon.

Interestingly, the most hotly debated aspect of the site has been and remains one that has been carried across every version of 1car1.com since the site launched over 7 years ago. The area of the site in question is the user registration form.

There is a fairly even divide between people who think that the user registration aspect of the site is a positive and useful element and, those who feel that it makes the online booking process more laborious than it needs to be.

Obviously as a company we need to take your details at some point so the real debate is whether you would prefer to give your details at the time of booking or when you actually collect the vehicle?

There are obvious advantages to providing your details at the time of booking, for a start once you are registered with the site you can just log in on your next visit and not have to enter your details at all. It also means that you do not have to spend as long at the rental counter giving details as we already have them from your reservation.

We also appreciate however that you do not want to have to fill out long and laborious online forms, so the question really is, where would you prefer to spend those extra minutes?

As the people that have to use our online reservations system, we want to make sure that the process is geared towards whatever is easiest and most convenient for you and so we invite your comments here on how you have found the experience of using our site and how it compares to others in the car rental industry that you have used.