Ireland-based European site Argus Car Hire is gearing up for a major relaunch of its website this week, timed wonderfully to coincide with a resurgence of sorts in car rental.
Although the sector was hit hard by the economic downturn, as the supply of fleet cars from manufacturers dried up, last week's acquisition of TravelJigsaw by Priceline indicated to some that car rental is now an area of the industry to watch.
This week sees another significant player in Europe, Argus, begin to roll out a string of new features to its site including significant personalisation and mapping functionality perhaps more akin to a trip planning website.
This latest move follows the widely praised work carried out Europcar last year in conjunction with web agency Fortune Cookie to throw the Microsoft Silverlight magic to its website - and, in turn, Surface functionality onto offline tables.
The ramping up of user experience on car rental sites indicates that the car search and buying process is changing and significant effort is being made to improve how users interact with such brands.
Argus is the consumer-facing business of car hire travel technology company CarTrawler, a major player behind the scenes powering a number of major online travel agency portals and airline sites.
Some are now pondering what is the valuation of Cartrawler/Argus and the company is now looking like a big acquisition target for others in the online travel agency space.
The other significant online player in Europe, HolidayAutos, remains for the time being still under Lastminute.com ownership despite widely rumoured to be up for sale in the summer of 2009.