Who Built the Car Rental Website Turo?
Back in 2010, it was difficult to find a reliable rental car in many parts of the world. Shelby Clark, the founder of Turo came across a similar experience in the city of Boston. As a result, an idea sprang into his mind, to launch a peer-to-peer car rental marketplace, that we today know as Turo. Earlier, Turo was named RelayRides. Shelby Clark had to manually distribute flyers across the city to onboard car owners on RelayRides and was able to enlist 40 cars.
Today, Turo’s business has expanded all over the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and France. It has over 350,000 vehicles listed on its marketplace and served over 3.5 million customers in 2024. With multiple sources positioning Turo as the leading P2P car rental platform, its success has also inspired many founders to launch the same. However, building a P2P car rental marketplace is a challenging task for all entrepreneurs.
To build a Turo-like marketplace and successfully capitalize on the business model, entrepreneurs require a strong technological framework and a well-devised onboarding strategy. Let us check out the approach that Turo took to build its marketplace and the key features required.
How Does Turo Car Rental Website Work?
Before moving on to Turo’s tech stack and development approach, it is important to understand how its car rental website works. To provide P2P car rental services, Turo’s website enlists multiple cars from different car owners. As Turo does not own any of the listed cars, its entire business remains asset-light and capitalizes on third-party vehicles. This ensures that Turo’s customers get a variety of options while renting and don’t have to stand in waiting queues to pick up their rented car.
Workflow of Turo Car Rental Website
- Users visit the Turo website and enter their location and rental dates in a search bar
- Turo displays all nearby cars along with other details, such as pricing, ratings, and a map view filter
- Users select their preferred car and enter rental dates, time, and booking fulfillment method (pick-up or drop-off)
- On the checkout page, users can verify all selected details about their bookings and select add-ons, such as child seats, protection plans (insurance), or cooler boxes for their trip
- In the next step, users select their preferred payment method and complete the payment
- Turo provides the car via the selected order fulfillment method
Turo’s entire workflow is short and simple. Anyone with a valid driving license can rent a car on Turo. As the cars listed on Turo are owned by other people, business expansion to new regions becomes a little easier. Turo only needs to ensure legal compliance, technological capabilities, and customer support to enter new regions.
Revenue Generation Model of Turo
Asset-light marketplaces often leverage multiple revenue generation streams to diversify income and ensure stable returns. Turo followed the same approach. By diversifying its revenue generation channels, Turo amplifies its returns and is able to secure its place as an industry leader in the market. Moreover, Turo offers a wide range of cars, including sports cars, trucks, pickup trucks, luxury vehicles, and more. For its premium offerings on the marketplace, Turo has created separate categories called Delux Class and Super Delux Class.
How Turo Makes Money?
- Rental commission: Turo deducts a small commission amount from all rental bookings that take place on its marketplace
- Turo Go: Turo Go is a mobile app for car owners that lets them lock and unlock their vehicles from a distance and manage rental operations. There are monthly recurring charges for the Turo Go app.
- Young drivers charge: Turo charges an additional young drivers fee ranging from $30-$50 for drivers aged 18-24.
- Extra kilometers: For every kilometer after the completion of the rental period, Turo lets car owners charge for extra kilometers that are also counted towards Turo’s commission.
- Renting luxurious cars: For renting out cars from its Deluxe and Super Deluxe classes, Turo charges a higher rental commission.
- Protection Plans: To ensure the safe usage of cars and reimburse any damages, Turo sells various protection plans on its website.
- Order cancellation charges: To recover lost opportunity costs and order processing costs, Turo levies order cancellation charges.
- Vehicle misrepresentation costs: In some cases, Turo levies a vehicle misrepresentation cost that ranges from $200 to $2000.
Technologies Used to Develop the Turo Car Rental Website
There are multiple approaches to develop a rental website today including both custom development and using a readymade car rental software. When it comes to Turo, it is highly probable that its website is custom-developed, which makes it easy to find its tech stack. We can also speculate that Shelby Clark hired a team of software engineers for Turo and gradually improved the website over the years. However, it might be difficult to find the team that worked on Turo’s website.
As per BuiltWith.com and W3Techs, the Turo car rental website is developed using the following technologies:
Programming Languages |
JavaScript, PHP, Ruby on Rails |
Web Frameworks |
Java EE (Enterprise Edition), Next.js |
Content Management Systems |
WordPress, Storyblock, and Atlassian |
Front-End Tools and Libraries |
Ajax, JQuery |
Cloud and Infrastructure Services |
Amazon S3, Cloudflare CDN, CDN JS |
Web Servers |
Siteground, Storyblock, Amazon, and Cloudflare |
Protocols and Integration |
DAV (Distributed Authoring and Versioning) |
CRM |
Zendesk |
Prefer a Readymade Rental Software Instead?
Features Required to Build a Website like Turo
Turo primarily caters to both car owners and users. It also has another user type, which is the marketplace admin. Thus, to ensure smooth P2P car rental operations, features for all these three user types are important. As rental workflows are vastly different from sales workflows, you will need several rent-centric features. Considering these factors, we have compiled a list of features below:
- Tiered Pricing: The option to let car owners set daily, weekly, and monthly rental pricing.
- Booking Calendar: The booking calendar will help you display vehicle availability on your car rental marketplace and prevent double bookings.
- Custom Registration Page: Onboard car owners by creating a custom registration page. You can collect information through different fields that you think are important.
- Rental Security Management: To reimburse any damages during the rental period for its Deluxe and Super Deluxe classes, Turo charges a rental security deposit. You can also fix a security amount and collect it from customers at checkout.
- Rental Agreement Management: Let car owners sanction their own terms and conditions on the marketplace and get them eSigned by customers.
- Document Verification: Accept and verify necessary documents, such as driving license and employee ID on the marketplace with a document verification feature.
- Rental Add-ons: Sell complementary goods and services on the marketplace, such as protection plans, child seats, car covers, and more.
- Late Cancellations Management: Late cancellations lead to lost orders and lower the overall order fulfillment rate. You should have the option to set varying cancellation periods along with respective charges.
- Late Returns Management: Late returns mean extra mileage and may affect upcoming orders. Thus, you also need an option to levy late return charges.
- Split Payment or eWallet: The split payment method ensures direct distribution of payment between admin (commission) and car owners (rental charges). On the other hand, you can also store car owner’s income in their eWallets and set up withdrawal settings such as minimum threshold amount and interval period.
- Maintenance Buffer Period: The maintenance buffer period will provide time to car owners for the inspection and servicing of their vehicles. Once the buffer period is over, the car will be automatically added back to the online inventory.
- Pick-up & Drop-off: Provide customers the option to select or search through pick-up and drop-off options.
- Map View Filter: Provide a map view filter on the search page of your marketplace to help customers find nearby vehicles for same-day drop-off or pick-up.
- Internal Messaging: Enable smooth interactions between car owners and customers with the help of an internal messaging system.
- Discounts and Coupons: Run various marketing campaigns with the help of discounts and coupon management features on your car rental marketplace.
- Reports and Analytics: Get in-depth insights on the most demanded vehicles, car owners, revenue reports, and more.
Building a Car Rental Marketplace like Turo
YoRent is a state-of-the-art software dedicated to all rental businesses. It helps entrepreneurs launch powerful rental websites and marketplaces with advanced rent-centric features that help them streamline daily business operations. Yo!Rent also covers numerous essential use cases, such as collecting rental security, verifying documents, levying rental terms and conditions, tracking overdue returns, and applying late return charges. For multi-vendor or Peer-to-Peer rental operations management, Yo!Rent has a comprehensive set of vendor management features that extend to maximum registration attempts, admin approval, vendor reports, commission settings, and withdrawal settings.
Other Reasons to Use YoRent
- One-time Cost: Unlike other rental software that come with never-ending monthly recurring costs, Yo!Rent comes at a one-time cost.
- Fully Customizable: Yo!Rent is a fully customizable car rental software that can help you meet additional features or design requirements.
- Limitless Access: There are no restrictions on the number of features, listings, transactions, and user profiles with Yo!Rent. You can scale and grow your business as much as you want without the need to upgrade to a different package.
- Multilingual and Multi-Currency Support: With Yo!Rent, you can easily expand your business to multiple locations. Its multi-lingual and multi-currency support will help you streamline operations in different regions.
- Free Technical Support:To ensure you uninterrupted business operations and complete peace of mind with the source code, Yo!Rent comes with 12 months of free technical support. For onboarding assistance, you get free training hours and complete documentation.
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Conclusion
Turo is a giant in the car rental industry, but each giant has its beginning. Every business had to make strong decisions and grow patiently. With the right Go-to-Market strategy, you can also establish a quick name in the industry and follow up with impactful and relevant marketing campaigns to maintain dominance. Likewise, keeping up with the changing consumer behavior and trends will help you stay resilient. For this, you will require fully customizable and versatile software, and that sums up what Yo!Rent provides. Based on your business preference, you can opt for the custom development approach as well.