ECO Rent A Car to Make Its Presence Felt Internationally

A professional car rental and ground transportation company. ECO is proud to be the winner of the prestigious national award, given by President of India, as the best ground transportation company.

BWDisrupt's Soumya Gupta interacted with Rajesh Loomba and Aditya Loomba, Joint Managing Director, ECO Rent A Car, which was founded in 1996.

Excerpts:
How it was started?
Envisioning the immense growth that the Car Rental and Taxi sector promises, it was in early 1974 that Late Capt. K.R. Loomba, ECO (Emergency Commissioned Officer) laid the foundation of the brand ECO Rent a Car with a single borrowed car. 22 years of toil metamorphosed it into a private limited company in the year 1996.

What can be said about the Unique features of your startup?
ECO offers the largest variety of Luxury Cars, SUVs, Vans and Coaches having its own offices in all major cities across India. Apart from Chauffeur driven cars, we offer all luxury Cars and SUVs on Self drive basis also. ECO is the company which owns a fleet of original Chrysler stretched limousines, which are regularly hired for Celebrations!

Our USP is our Chauffeurs. They are selected carefully and trained on various aspects like Driving Skills, Discipline, Safety, Hygiene and Courteousness.We also provide a list of complimentary amenities in the cars for guest’s usage, which are not provided by any other company.

What is your current funding status?
We are a self funded company.

Please share with us your existing Monetization model?
Since we are majorly a B2B company most of our payments are either by online bank transfers , cheque and credit card based.

For our B2C customers we are tying up with mobile wallet companies to make payment process flexible as per the customers convenience and preference. We have also waived off the credit card processing fee to make credit card payment option attractive for our customers.

Tell us about the traction details?
Majority of bookings is from chauffeur drive segment , for mid segment cars , SUVs and luxury cars and vans. We have also seen a steady rise in self drive bookings specially on weekends and holiday season.

Tier 1 cities is the market with big volumes but Tier 2 cities is forming a sharp growth curve and we see the trend contuining for next 2-3 years as these cities continue to develop.

This is the reason ECO has opened offices in tier-2 cities like pune, lucknow and Ahmedabad as they are maturing markets We are growing at a good pace and have expanded our Employee Transport Services which provides Shuttle services and shared car services as per the client budgets across all cities in India.

We are also focusing on Event Transport services and recently provided services for major events like BRICS summit in Goa.

What vision do you have for the Future of this venture?
Right now, we have a presence in 45 cities across India and planning to foray into other countries. Also, we are planning to add more cars to our fleet to an existing 3200 cars.

How much effort has gone into your Marketing initiatives?
Digital Marketing and Social Media presence is the key and focus on high quality services so that our customers become our brand ambassadors.

What kind of Challenges did you faced while building this business?
We at Eco Rent a car believe that challenges also bring opportunities.
We always look for new opportunities to grow and inclusive growth has been the DNA of our business.

What is the Market size & Opportunity you are looking at?
We see the luxury car rental market growing and we are partnering with luxury car companies to offer the best services to our discerning clients. Luxury automobiles market in India has grown at a fast pace, therefore, raising the standards of road travel.Today’s traveler has experienced the best cars globally and wants the same level of comfort in India as well.