How MirrorTrip is solving the problem of one-way car rental

This inspiring story is of a rising startup called MirrorTrip started by Reece Griffin in the mobility domain. For inter-city travel: MirrorTrip is a one-way car rental solution that matches you with people driving in the opposite direction – turning one-way trips into a round trip so that you don’t have to pay drop-off fees. Here is the story of MirrorTrip in Reece’s own words.

Introduce us to the idea of MirrorTrip

MirrorTrip’s unique innovation is a new mode of car sharing that we call ‘ride switching’. We invented MirrorTrip to solve the long lived one-way rental car drop-off fee problem.

When you pick a rental car up in one city, and then drop it off in another city, you will often be charged a ‘drop off fee’ which can range from a few hundred dollars to more than a thousand dollars sometimes.

MirrorTrip solves this problem by matching people driving in opposite directions so that the second driver can return the car once the first driver has finished with it. We have deals in place with top tier rental companies that allow us to do this.

What’s your strategy story? What led you to start MirrorTrip?

It was mile number 3,000 of my 2016 European summer trip. My wife & I drove the south of France and Spain in a rental car. From previous experience I knew that inter-city one-way car rentals were expensive, particularly if you want to drop in another country.

Seeing the same high drop charges quoted, we decided to drive two loops, one in France starting & ending in Paris, then flew to Spain and did the same thing there – a loop starting and ending in Madrid.

On the way back to Madrid, the penny dropped for a new idea. What if there was a service that matched people driving in opposite directions so that someone else could return the vehicle for me and help me avoid the one-way drop-off fee (for this trip it would have been about 1,000 Euros).

Doing what most people do at this stage, I got to our next hotel & Googled it. I confirmed my suspicions that this was a real problem. The first Google result was an article describing the problem & suggesting workarounds such as hiring a towing company. Then at the bottom of the article were a couple of hundred blog comments from people who had run into this problem before and even some of them trying to find others using the comments section to relocate a car for them.

What marketing, operation strategies are you adopting at MirrorTrip?

The concept of one-way car rentals isn’t a new one. High volumes of people search for terms like ‘one-way car rental’ every month. This makes MirrorTrip a good candidate for paid search advertising and SEO. So we focus most of our efforts there.

On top of that, there are a lot of people currently being underserved using workarounds like the ride-sharing section of Craigslist and Kijiji – so we do a fair amount of growth hacking on these platforms letting people that other options exist.

Any strategy mistakes you have made and what did you learn? 

Yup! Initially we needed to find a way for MirrorTrip to work within the confines of existing rental companies; e.g. why would a rental company let MirrorTrip do what it plans to do? Our initial ‘breakthrough’ was to realize that a driver can sign another driver onto the contract at any other participating location. E.g. if you picked up at Avis Seattle on the way to LA & you got tired of driving, you could pull into an Avis in San Francisco and sign your travelling partner onto the contract. This was our initial assumption as to how MirrorTrip would (could) work.

Pretty soon though we realized that this opened up some financial exposure to the first driver. E.g. Actions performed by the second driver could have a financial impact on the first driver. Some persistent work with rental partners allowed us though to negotiate a system where the first contract would be closed altogether & a new one started after that. Which is even better, from a flexibility perspective.

Finally what advice do you have for your fellow entrepreneur readers?

Talk to lots of customers. One advantage of having few customers, to begin with, is that you can offer un-sustainable amounts of customer service; pile it on thick, delight your customers & learn what makes them tick at the same time. This type of qualitative information is golden, something that cannot be extrapolated from any amount of data or analytics.

Disclaimer: The information in the above story is provided by the startup and The Strategy Story takes no responsibility for the authenticity of the product and services offered by the startup. Reader’s discretion is advised.

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