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WANT TO HELP PEOPLE EXPLORE INDIA, ONE ROAD TRIP AT A TIME: GAURAV AGGARWAL

Savaari Rentals co-founder Gaurav Aggarwal, in an interview with NewsX, talks about his brand, how it is changing the way people travel, and the mission of his company.

Gaurav Aggarwal, founder & CEO of Savaari Car Rentals, a company that has services in 2,000 cities across the country, recently joined NewsX for a conversation as part of NewsX India A-List. He talked about his start-up journey, the mission of his company, and how the post-Covid times have changed how people travel.

Talking about the inception of Savaari, Gaurav said, “Right from my college days in the US, I used to book rental cars online. On one of my trips to India back in 2015, I was looking to book an online chauffeur or a rental car from Delhi to Dehradun and I couldn’t find a car rental company online that I could trust with quality service and a reasonable rate and ended up asking a friend to help me out with it. I realised that this market is largely unorganised after doing a bit of research. Post this incident, we started with the idea of Savaari car rentals. The most conservative estimates put the Indian car rental market at $15B annually. Though billions of dollars have been spent by two on-demand players in the market during the past seven years, it is quite surprising that 85% of the market still remains unorganised.”

He spoke about the services provided by Savaari Car Rentals, ”We provide quality chauffeur rides with car rentals in close to 2000+ cities across India at super competitive rates. Simultaneously, we offer customisation and assistance through our spirited 24×7 customer support team, thus providing the ideal combination of a technology platform and a services-based approach. In these cities, we provide airport transfers, local rentals, and inter-city travels. We provide round-trips around the city where you keep the car and the driver with you and Bombay inter-city drops so that you can travel from one city to another.”

Emphasising how the company is different from others, Gaurav expressed, “Indian consumers are not easy to please. They want quality service at a cheaper and reasonable cost and that is the reason why the market has remained highly unorganised as there is no pan-India player that you can go to and who you could trust for high quality, reliability and at competitive rates. So this is the gap that we had identified and set out to work towards the same.”

When asked about the growth of the company over the last few years, he underlined that Savaari Car Rentals has been one of the few startups that has become profitable. Gaurav said, “We became profitable in FY19 and our company witnessed solid growth in 2020. Although FY21 has been majorly impacted due to the Covid-19 lockdown. We are looking to do around 122 crore profit by the FY22, which will be close to 50% profit plus growth for our FY21, it will be quite an impressive growth.”

He stresses that his brand stands at the core of trust, customer safety and comfortable rides. Gaurav told us about some of the unique features offered by the company including travel kits, and language selection option for the drivers, “The Covid-19 pandemic has changed the way people travel and commute. While the pre-pandemic travel demand was traditionally centred on leisure and business, travel was more need-based during the lockdown. With the vaccination drive starting in different phases across the country, the road ahead looks promising. Domestic travel has resumed, giving people a chance to finally step out of their houses to give themselves a well-deserved break. Travel picture in 2021 looks optimistic and the year is being tagged as the return of the classic road-trips in India.”

On a concluding note, he shared his vision of the company and how it is changing trends of travel, “Post Covid-19, we expect that there would be a lot of regional travelling and there is a new trend called ‘Revenge Travel’ where people who have been stuck in lockdown or those who had to cancel their trip because of the lockdown will take a trip. Off late, there has been a trend of exploring new places and road trips are the best way to explore these places. Our mission is to help you explore India, one road trip at a time.”

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