<article> From car hire to software engine

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A nice piece about Greg Turley in the FT at the moment.

Greg Turley was brought up alongside his family’s car rental business. “I remember coming home from school, opening the door and picking up the phone to take a booking,” he says. Now aged 47, he is still involved in car hire but at the head of a multimillion-euro pure technology company based in Dublin.

The original family business started in the rural west of Ireland, when his father’s builder workmates were getting married and he was the only one with a car to ferry the wedding party and guests around.

That was in 1959. Later, the Turley family moved east to Dublin and Argus, their car rental business, flourished. Mr Turley joined straight from school.

Three years ago, however, he sold the car rental business to concentrate on his new company, CarTrawler, which uses innovative technology to link airlines, hotel chains and other travel industry customers with 500 multinational and independent car rental companies. Annual turnover is €100m ($138m).

The shift to running a software company, albeit one still focused on car rental, began in the early 1990s. “We were in a situation where we had to decide – do we accept the status quo and get squeezed out or do we duck and dive and be smart and work around it?” he says of the initial move online. But it meant he was well-placed to change direction fast and develop an international technology company as the Irish economy contracted by 14 per cent over the past three years and tipped many Irish businesses into failure.

Only a small amount of Mr Turley’s business is still in Ireland – but, apart from family ties, the low rate of Irish corporation tax remains a reason to keep the company based in the country.

As someone who claims that even getting a fax machine “blew my mind”, Mr Turley made a bold move in embracing the online car rental model in the 1990s. But his decision was borne out of necessity. As a small car hire company, he had been fighting for survival against the big international brands.

Speaking in his offices high in the roofspace of a converted Catholic church in south Dublin, he reveals that the shift to the internet was inspired by a software programmer who got talking when he wanted to hire a van to move home. “I was more worried about the return of the van at the time, to be honest. I thought he had flipped, gone to the other side. All this talk about the worldwide web – it sounded like science fiction.”

Mr Turley believes he is good at seeing around problems – an ability to improvise that he puts down, at least in part, to profound childhood dyslexia. “When all the other kids were going off to play rugby, I had to go down to St John of God’s in Rathgar to learn how to read and write. Being told you’re stupid as a child is a great motivator for a businessman.”

In Mr Turley’s case, the problem was that, unlike Hertz and other big rental companies, he had no access to a global distribution system such as Galileo or Amadeus. These companies had a hold over the travel industry, controlling a vast proportion of the leisure, airline, hotel and car rental market through a travel agent network of desktop applications or green screens. The Argus family business was surviving on scraps, reduced more and more to relying on a telephone call from the porter in a Dublin hotel. “I had no visibility ... All the business we got was demand on the day,” he recalls.

Today, CarTrawler is still based in Dublin but it has 85 employees and offices in Seattle and Alicante in Spain, the main European market for car hire, and it has won a string of innovation and travel industry awards.

The CarTrawler platform is install*ed in a number of international airlines, such as Malaysia Airlines and Virgin Blue, and the booking service is available to about 200m airline passengers worldwide. The platform, which can be installed directly into a hotel or airline’s own booking software, acts like a car rental exchange, pricing the product in real time to match the market and maximise the returns. An airline might no longer have an exclusive deal with one rental car supplier but use the CarTrawler system to get the best deal from all available operators. Mr Turley enthuses that it is “a perfect market”.

But, back in the early 1990s, even a business website was quite novel in Ireland. Mr Turley contacted one of the few highly visible Irish sites, The Virtual Irish Pub, which was basically a chatroom for Irish-Americans to reminisce about the “old sod”. Together, they constructed a car rental portal, which he believes was Europe’s first car rental website.

“We got a great response. But the trouble was the inquiries we got were for everything but Dublin. Cars in Barcelona, in Paris – heaven knows where.

“It was then I realised there was a bigger opportunity out there. It opened my mind to the idea of brokering car hire globally.”

In 1999, he launched an online car hire brokerage for independent companies. By 2004, he was ready to take on the GDS companies, launching CarTrawler with his other shareholders, brother Niall and Bobby Healy, the company’s chief technology officer, who joined the Turleys after selling his airline software company, Eland Technologies.

Irish businesses seeking ways to survive and thrive must rediscover opportunities overseas now that the Celtic Tiger has been caught by the tail, counsels Mr Turley. CarTrawler’s focus is firmly global as it recruits new customers. A deal was signed last month with Dollar Thrifty, currently the object of rival bids from Hertz and Avis. “Anyone booking out of North America flying to Europe will use our technology,” says Mr Turley.

The deal will allow the US customers of Dollar Rent a Car and Thrifty Car Rental to pay beforehand – in the US, customers normally pay on arrival at the airport or hotel.

“Rather than invest themselves, [the US companies] are taking our technology to distribute their content globally, country by country. It allows them to take payment – part pay or full pay – in more than 20 languages and over 40 different currencies,” Mr Turley says.

He believes one of CarTrawler’s key advantages is it offers consumers the whole market, while the GDS companies typically only handle the biggest brands – nine in all, which today are controlled by just five companies.

“It gives the consumer peace of mind if they can see the full market ... If you offer consumers one car hire company, you alienate your price-sensitive customer,” he says, adding that Ryanair passengers are CarTrawler’s biggest source of online bookings.

Does he have any regrets? “Yes, that I stuck in the physical car rental business for too long. It’s difficult to sell a family business but I should have got out earlier.”

In his own words: Greg Turley

Greg Turley on how he transformed a Dublin car hire company into a global tech business.

● On the Irish economy: “We do very little business in Ireland. It’s just too small. You have to think global – globalisation isn’t such a bad word.”

● On management style: “I’ve always believed in recruiting the best people. Any area where I’m weak, I’ve brought in talent. In most cases, I employ people who are smarter than me, and why wouldn’t you?”

● On how CarTrawler willchange the airport car rental desk: “You go to any airport and behind the car rental desk there are staff inputting data. Our technology will pump that in automatically before you land. That will free the staff to do what they should be doing – selling bigger cars and insurance products. The car rental desk is probably the most expensive retail space around an airport.”

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