Rental Car Booking Engine Case Study

Introduction

The primary objective of creating this application was to add a new product offering to the company’s existing products and services for the car rental industry. The main selling proposition to the existing client base was the ability to use their points to purchase rental cars and benefit from a reduced price.

This booking engine is part of a multisite application which is designed to host multiple brands.

One of the most challenging goals that we achieved was:

Create a user interface that can be easily adopted by many other brands. We achieved this by creating a custom cascading stylesheet that would accompany every brand website on the multisite platform to style the overall look and feel of the site.

The target goal of the project was as follows:

Create a user experience where users can buy and use points to save on rental car purchases. This experience had to be incorporated into the search page, a payment method page, and within the checkout experience.

Search Experience

In most cases, the user would enter the search page from the club site where a search would be performed. The user has the ability to enter a pickup and drop-off location, pickup date and time, and drop-off date and time. Additional search criteria include trip type and proximity; airport or off airport.

The user has the option of viewing the search results either as listings or by map. Both on the search results listings and map page, I’ve displayed the savings credits points that can be applied to each listing. The search by map gives the user the option to click on a location displayed on the map and view the available listings that match the search criteria.

Payment Experience

On the payment page, we present the user with the option to pay online and save a percentage off the total price by using points, or to pay in person at the counter and forfeit any discount. To encourage the user to make a decision to pay online, I laid out both option for comparison side by side and highlighted the savings information.

Checkout Experience

In lifting the burden off the user, we pre-filled the payment form with any information we already had, like first name, last name, email and phone number. Ideally we wanted to preset a set amount of points to apply to a user's purchase by default without encouraging them to modify this amount. In doing so, the points' adjustment table located in a modal box activated by a link which is less obvious.