CEO Mike McGearty & Richard Prosser, Chairman of CarTrawler
There’s a new ride in town looking for a place to park. Direct from Dublin, Car Trawler is a nifty plug and play car booking engine. The model is simple: plug the widget into your website, and collect a share of the booking revenue.
Car Trawler is well funded and well managed. The CEO, Mike McGearty, and Chairman, Richard Prosser, were in Toronto recently for a power breakfast at the tiny Cumberland Hotel. The company processes 1.5 million car rentals a year and is aiming for 2 million in 2012. Their system hooks into 550 car rental companies around the world that they have agreements with. Which means any Canadian retailer can offer a breadth of product to their clients.
Mike McGearty made no bones about wanting to expand in Canada. “We see a lot of opportunity here. Retailers are well established and the economy is stable. In terms of existing contracts, our technology is very advanced – we can customize search results to give preference to preferred relationships.”
When asked about direct sales, both men were adamant, “We are a B2B specialist. Our goal is to grow the business through travel agents, airlines, OTA’s, and any touch point where a consumer might be thinking of a car.
Mike explains that, “We are a technology driven company and that is our focus.” In fact, the technology is quite sophisticated. The Car Trawler system tracks user preferences and suggests a car rental based on the information it has acquired. For instance, an air booking indicating a party of 4 will not be offered a sub-compact car option.
They already have a few distribution agreements in Canada – notably with Softvoyages and a few retailers.
In terms of the name, it sounds like a case of someone being too close to their home market. I imagine “Car Trawler” sounds dandy in Ireland. But to me it conjures a big metal arm fishing up car carcasses from some murky place.
Fortunately, from what they tell me, it’s a brilliant product.
