We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Lisa Woodhead. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Lisa below.

Lisa, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

The business was founded over 15 years ago around the time that markets were taking a hit. Personally I needed to do something to help get some income coming in and started thinking about what the Orlando area offered to people and where I could fit in. Obviously tourism forms a major part of our state income and I focused on this and how I could tap into that demand. As an ex-pat (Brit) I knew from experience that vacations here are made up of booking a flight, booking a place to stay and then booking separate car rental and airport transfers. So I though why not combine the last two and offer something a bit different?

It took a bit of research and a lot of calls to insurance companies but eventually I had things in place so that I could rent out my own car – which was luckily fairly new. I used social media connections to get word out and took an enquiry within a month. I was apprehensive that what we were offering would be overshadowed by the ‘big’ brand renters but it seemed we had hit on a niche that understood the benefits and were willing to pay a little extra for our service. We never looked back.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Car On The Drive does exactly what it says. We provide an airport transfer service and car rental service combined. We pick you up from the airport and transfer you to your accommodation – where one of our team has already delivered your rental vehicle. All you do is sign and take the keys. No upsell, no waiting in lines, no missing out on drinks on the flight, no navigating to unknown places after a long flight and no stress!

From having one car to rent out we quickly grew and built up a fleet of different vehicles so we could cater to different tastes. We invested in bigger transport vehicles so we could move more people and take larger bookings and today we can handle groups of 20+ and regularly rent 3 or 4 vehicles at a time to such groups.

I’m proud to have set our mission statement to be ‘a totally unique car rental service’ and have this baked into the core of our beliefs as we strive to offer guests a service that can’t be found anywhere else.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

No one could have foreseen the COVID epidemic and the impact it had on global travel. We saw an overnight decline in tourism and obviously the rental industries that supported it were hit extremely hard. We took the ‘down time’ to reevaluate the business and to plan ahead for better times.

As a small independent car rental company our biggest challenge has been to gain trust amongst travelers. Social media has been a great way for us to communicate quickly and show people the vehicles and service we offer. Coupled with great feedback and support from travel blogs our name has grown and we have a large percentage of repeat bookings which we are proud of.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

Communication. Internally – never miss an opportunity to talk to people. Most of my most successful business contacts have been developed through chance occurrences and being brave enough to strike up a conversation. Externally – constant communication through select social channels (worked for us). Don’t fall into the trap that communicating relentlessly on all platforms will somehow bring in business – it wont. Find out where your target audience is getting their information from and join in, slowly at first – don’t bombard folks.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.caronthedrive.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/caronthedrive
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/CarOnTheDrive/
• Twitter: https://x.com/caronthedrive
• Other: www.tiktok.com/@caronthedrive
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