CarTrawler, the Ireland-based car rental technology provider, says it is making a big move "beyond rental" in 2015.
From next year, CarTrawler's customers will be able to choose car rental products alongside others services such as limos, taxis, shuttles and brands such as Uber, Lyft and Hailo.
The company says it has seen the need for a more comprehensive range of ground transportation solutions that can be personalized by customer, by country and by continent.
Chief technology officer Bobby Healy says "anything with wheels (other than bicycles) is fair game to our extended marketplace".
The move to extend the company's remit into other areas of ground transportation has been in the pipeline for over two years, Healy says.
Healy says:
"We have completely re-architected our core KOIOS platform to make us more generic. This means we can drop in multiple forms of ground transport beside our core car rental in a way that is native.
"The widening product set will also be distributed through our global base of partnerships effective immediately."
Hailing services such as Uber have a different business model and revenue collection strategy than car rental provider, but Healy says the process is still evolving and it is "committed to maximizing the revenue per customer for our airlines and major OTA partnerships".
It will be up to the individual operators such as Uber (which has its recently introduced APOI) et al as to how they connect into the CarTrawler marketplace.
Healy says:
"We want our own partners to share ultimately in every penny of their travelling customers wallets. And we have the distribution and user interface presence to enable that already."
Airline revenue derived from ancillary sources is estimated to reach almost $50 billion in 2014. This can range from an $13 per passenger in Asia-Pacific to $24 per passenger in Europe and Russia.
Passengers in the Americas contribute an average of $26 per passenger from non-air fare related purchases.
Healy says CarTrawler will remain only the aggregator behind the scenes, rather than acting as an operator of any service.
NB:Car share image via Shutterstock.