When Was the Last Time Your Car Rental Company Shared its Technology Roadmap?

When was the last time your car rental company shared its technology roadmap? To elevate the experience of delivering rental cars, Kyte must openly share our culture of continuous improvement and transparency, building both technology and operations with you the customer in mind.

What is Kyte? Kyte delivers rental cars directly to you for any trip longer than a rideshare. We currently serve our customers across 13 markets in the United States. Since Kyte was founded in 2019, we have differentiated ourselves in quality and convenience in a number of ways. We don't have rental counters or stores and make technology and operational investments to drastically elevate the rental experience and keep costs low for our customers.

In 2022, we launched many product features:

In addition, we remedied regularly occurring internal tooling outages to improve our employees’ ability to assist customers

We’ve been fortunate to land ABS financing from Goldman and Ares, furthering our ambitions to become the world’s largest fleet operator and were successful in completing a Series B fundraise during a very difficult time in the market. Overall, it has been an amazing few years at Kyte!

While these product and operational milestones definitely show progress, one of our values at Kyte is to get better every day, and our technology is no exception. Over the next 18 months, Kyte will invest in a technology roadmap that further improves self-sufficiency for our customers, increases trust and transparency on our platform, creates frictionless experiences, and allows for our team to proactively solve customer problems.

Self-explanatory product flows allow us to support our users without increasing our support volume and personnel - another way Kyte enables convenience and cost efficiency for customers. An increasing number of Kyte customers are finding convenience in one of our newly-released features: Trip Extensions. Using the Kyte app, you can extend your trip without having to contact support. Just simply modify the date, time, or location with ease. Throughout the year, we will also introduce an increasing amount of flexibility around car handovers by expanding our ability to deliver outside of our service areas as well as other options.

For example, we’re piloting pickup-at-lot, which will allow customers to select their preference of self-pickup or delivery. We expect that giving this choice to customers will lead to a more convenient experience while giving you, the customer, a higher degree of flexibility around forming your Kyte experience to your needs.

For most rental car experiences, common complaints are due to poor car cleanliness or lack of transparency around fees for things like tolls and citations. Kyte cleans and maintains its cars through a workflow that is executed at the end of every trip. Our customers enjoy low mileage, clean vehicles at a reasonable price. With the launch of our surfer app, we plan to go deeper on the quality of our cleaning and maintenance workflows to ensure the highest quality experience.

This year, Kyte plans to simplify the traditional car rental receipt structure, by providing full transparency about what fees customers are charged for a given service. Whether you zipped through a toll station with ease or received a surprise parking ticket during your trip, Kyte will provide the ultimate transparency. We will also simplify the receipts you receive to allow for easy business expenses and to maintain a simple to understand booking experience that is best in class.

Rental agreements are one of the most complicated topics of the car rental business – we will further increase trust by creating documents that are crisp, upfront, and easy to understand. We plan to build an easy-to-understand and up to date documentation for your rental including any coverage or limitations that are included. Customers will have full access to their past rental agreements in case of need for reference or in the situation where a damage or claim arises.

Part of Kyte’s value proposition is to decrease the overall friction involved in getting a car. Our technology will support the majority of edge cases encountered in the world of atoms, and assist our market leaders with marketplace efficiency in dispatching our surfers, managing our lots, and empowering customers to solve their own problems.

To provide a 5-star delivery, our matching algorithm will advance to provide global optimizations so that auto-matching becomes the norm for surfers, ensuring fewer trips result in bad experiences and that the ideal surfer is matched or re-matched to an available trip with ease. We will focus on adding re-matching and using global optimization to build surfer schedules so users and surfers experience the highest quality scheduling automation available to date.

Kyte’s internal operations have a direct impact on your customer experience. Unresolved problems can lead to issues at our lots that sideline vehicles and create a bottleneck for us to provide you with your transportation as effortlessly as possible. By continuing to invest in our Dispatch and Support tooling we can flag small problems (e.g. delays, scheduling issues, etc.) before they turn into larger, compounding issues in our markets.

Kyte can also streamline the traditionally nightmarish claims process by using automated condition reports and one-click claim creations to cut the processing time. Kyte can catch and resolve any vehicle issue and provide the fastest response to our customers with these tools. Investing in this internal tooling allows us to provide the highest quality experience at the lowest cost for you.

We’re excited to share more over the coming months about more of our Technology plans. These are just a few of the exciting updates we are focused on, we have SO much more to share with you!