Since 2008, Retroventures has been renting out cars, motorcycles, and bicycles to people from around the world visiting Ireland. When they started experiencing challenges tracking their inventory and automating bookings, they found Booqable to be the ideal solution for these issues. Recently, they opened a new office in France and are beginning the next stage of their rental business.
Retroventures
Chris Davidson started Retroventures in 2008 as a classic car rental business for visitors to Ireland. At the core of the business, he wanted to provide the best value among the company’s competitors. In 2013, he expanded the business offering to include motorcycles and started designing motorcycle tours across Ireland.
Providing value to customers has remained a constant goal as the business has developed. A key aspect in striving towards this goal has been using Royal Enfield motorcycles, which are new but with a vintage heart. This helps to keep the maintenance costs down and means they don’t have to charge customers as much. In recent years, they have also started offering bicycle and e-bike rentals.
Retroventures helps customers from all over the world experience Ireland in a unique way. They have had customers from everywhere, including the USA, Canada, India, and the rest of Europe. A particular group that stood out was 15 tourists from Australia who spent two weeks exploring the beautiful country with Chris and his team.
Tracking inventory and automating bookings
As the company diversified its offering and grew its reach to more customers, Chris and his team began to experience some challenges. They were finding it difficult to keep track of their inventory accurately, which made knowing the availability of their products quite hard. In addition, they would manually take customer bookings, which was very time-consuming.
As a result, Chris searched for a software solution that would address these challenges and streamline the rental operation. His search led him to Booqable, and he quickly realized it was exactly what they were looking for as an established business. He was able to add his entire inventory to Booqable, track product availability when creating orders, and get an overview in the calendar.
In addition, he integrated Booqable online booking components with his Duda website to allow visitors to browse his inventory. Now, customers can select their vehicle, see when it is available, and complete their booking themselves. This has reduced the number of manual bookings Chris and his team have to process, saving them a lot of time.
Expanding to France
The time savings and inventory control they have achieved since implementing Booqable have allowed Chris and his team to consider expansion. They have just opened a new office in Nice, France, which will allow them to expand into mainland Europe. This means they will be able to offer customers guided motorcycle tours across not only France but the entire continent.
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