Page 5 - Fortune-November 01, 2018

Since the acquisition, Avis’s
capital spending on technology
has tripled, reaching $128 mil-
lion last year. In 2016, not long
after De Shon became CEO, Avis
rolled out a new, more sophisti-
cated (and partly Zipcar-inspired)
app for its namesake brand that
lets customers book or change
a reservation, keep receipts and
speed up check-ins and drop-
offs. Orduña, who became head
of innovation that year, set about
updating Avis’s tech plumbing. He
created an application program-
ming interface (API)—an open
software-development system that
allows ride-hailing services, digital
mapmakers, city planners, and
other potential partners to add
elements to and share data with
Avis’s app. API platforms could
be a key revenue driver down the
line: Orduña envisions a scenario
in which, for example, a depart-
ment store would pay Avis a fee,
in return for which Avis would
embed ads in its app to steer users
to the store’s website. The app
could also literally steer them to
the store: A traveler who forgot to
pack socks could be chauffeured to
a shopping site by her self-driving
rental sedan.
Orduña’s team has done even
more ambitious work on the con-
nectivity project. In August, Avis
reached the milestone of 100,000
vehicles connected to the Internet.
critical, as a chance to revitalize its business DRIVING The device that’s central to those connections
and a path back into customers’ good graces. CHANGE is a contraption installed on the underside of
Avis’s 2013
“Tech that gets me into the car faster will be acquisition of each car’s hood. It’s loaded with sensors that
a big factor in molding customer satisfac- Zipcar (top) read the car’s vital signs, from its exact loca-
tion,” says Michael Taylor, J.D. Power’s head has helped it tion to the precise state of metrics like fuel
of travel. experiment with levels, tire pressure, and brake-pad health.
car sharing and
Avis began laying the groundwork for a improve its app. These prosaic-looking devices could have a
tech-driven rebound in 2013. That year, Avis Providing main- big financial impact. For a given car to make a
paid $500 million to acquire Zipcar, the tenance for penny of profit for a rental company, it needs
startup that rents cars on an hourly basis from Waymo (above) to be rented out at least 82% of the time. If
is giving it a foot
self-service sites scattered through neighbor- in the door in the Avis can monitor a car’s vital signs in real
T HIS SPRE A D: COUR T ESY OF AV IS bling down on its core business, digesting a duce the odds of a breakdown that would take
self-driving-car
time, it can avoid spending money servicing
hoods and downtowns. The move seemed
industry.
quixotic to some—at the time, Hertz was dou-
cars that don’t need it. Conversely, it can re-
a car out of service (not to mention alienate
$2.3 billion acquisition of Dollar Thrifty. But
renters who suffered a roadside mishap).
while the car-sharing market remains small,
Zipcar has turned into an internal catalyst for
Location tracking also helps Avis milk
more revenue-earning days out of its fleet.
ideas about rejuvenating Avis.
123
FO R T U N E. CO M // N O V. 1 . 1 8