Who We Are?
OLYMPIC CAR RENTALS was founded in 1989, on the island of Crete, in the area of STALIS, is an innovative company in Greece which operates in the field of car rentals, serving thousands of reservations every year. Being aware of the market and following a series of strategic movements that took place during a five-year period, has resulted in the distinction and differentiation of the company between its competitors and acquisition of a constantly increasing market share.
More specifically OLYMPIC CAR RENTALS management focused initially its attention on the study of the nationality and the demographic characteristics of tourists that visit Greece and especially Crete, to target on the right group of consumers, while also focused on the capacity expansion in Crete by renting one more office in Heraklion and two in Chania. The company then bought the brand name of Olympic Car Rentals which belonged to Eternal S.A in order to attract existing customers. Its current fleet is equivalent to 700 cars unlike its original fleet which consisted of 50 cars.
The company role as an emerging player in the car hire sector is also very important, transporting thousands of customers among the islands of Crete, Rhodes, Kos, Corfu, and mainland Athens, Thessaloniki, Kavala, Volos, Patras and Alexandroupolis. The company’s goal is to achieve a win-win relation between her team and the customers and to establish a climate of confidence and reliability by providing excellent quality of services. We strongly believe that customers loyalty, which noticed in these days that is loose and unstable, is the key for this goal. The vision of the company is represented by the slogan «We serve the customer… not the booking!»
OLYMPIC CAR RENTALS is a dynamic company which operates in the field of tourism and hospitality. The company specifically operates in the car rental market and now holds a very strong position in the industry in Greece.
The industry of tourism has a strong tradition in Greece and contributes in the country’s GDP with a percentage of 16,3% and in employment with a percentage of 18,2%. It is a highly competitive industry which thus holds a stable market share equivalent to 3,2% from 2000 until today in Europe, while worldwide attracts a percentage of around 1,7% of tourists.
OLYMPIC CAR RENTALS company is an Ltd. Company founded in 1989 in Heraklion, Crete which is the second county in tourism after Attica, reaching in 2014 2.606.472 arrivals. Apart from the company’s CEO, and the company’s management and marketing manager, Michael Psarakis, The company employs about 20 people whose duties varies (contract deliveries, engineers with excellent knowledge, transport and car deliveries, office staff etc.). The company also maintains excellent working relationships with external partners, some of which are the companies autoescape, atlaschoice, cartrawler and cardelmar. The company’s central office is based on Heraklion but the company also has in its disposal three more offices, two of which are based on Chania. The company’s fleet amounts approximately to 500 cars.
Target Market
Our company is addressed to people who visit greece and look for a cheap means of transport in order to be transferred from the airport to their hotel and also use it throughout their stay. 95% of our customers are british, germans, French, swiss, dutch, Austrian and Italian and we mainly target uk, german and French markets. ages allowed are between 23 and 75 with an average of 45 years.
We are a low cost car rental company providing technological solutions using the latest available software. With our software platform we have presence in major search engines via the biggest car rental brokers we have partnered with (i.e. argus carhire, direct2carrentals, atlas choice, car del mar, auto escape. etc) and in major comparison websites they cooperate with (travelsupermarket, etc.).
This way we are able to have a competitive price as well as being flexible to change it instantly whenever it is necessary. Our target is to reach more markets and hence more customers via our broker partners and our own websites using search engine marketing (SEM) and google advertising.
The Competition Situation
Our company at the moment is at the very pleasant position of not facing strong competition from the small players (up to 150 cars). Therefore,competition is attributed to big national and international brands. In fact, our domestic competitors in Greece are big international brands like avis, hertz, europcar etc., brands with similar advanced technological tools, quality of service and fleet.
Our advantage against these companies is that there is no middleman to take commission (and hence increase the final rate). On the contrary,we directly give prices and subsequently carry out the reservation.This results in considerable profit margins and consequently we can provide better prices to every customer.
Development and Promotion
The development of the website constitutes a major part. The programming language, the friendly environment, the functionality, the construction of simple and beautiful graphics, the quality and the easy finding of the providing services, as well as many other information which is important for our website to acquire the proper specifications in order to be ranked in the highest places among the most popular search engines. In addition, the processing of the data promotion also constitutes a crucial factor for the leading we have achieved.
All of our partners daily optimize the promotion of our website by improving their cognitive backgrounds in evaluation criteria of the search engines and by adding more keywords in the backend of the sites. It is worthwhile to mention that, our partners have also undertaken the processing of market control,that is the research of the market and the competitors.
Advertising
The advertising on search engines (i.e. google), constitutes a huge driving force development for our website. This moment, the budget for our google campaign costs approximately 100.000 per year, however this campaign can give us “keywords” in all European countries.
Operations
Our company retains three main functions
1. Reservations
Reservation department consists of three subcategories which are:
- monitoring of market prices
- uploading the most competitive prices on the market
- the reservation mechanism including the software for accepting reservations
2. Delivery and collection of the car
Includes airport information desks with skilled and multilingual employees, providing the best service to our customers and all the necessary information for delivering and picking-up cars
3. Customer support and car service
Includes specific e-mails and qualified stuff for 24hour service, workshops and emergency service places
Management and Organizational Structure
The company has the organizational structure and the experience to successfully manage the business plan. Her organization chart adequately covers her needs.
Our company culture is based on:
- The team spirit and the assurance of corporate consistency
- Flexible and participatory targeting
- Encouraging creative participation and innovation
- The connectivity between incentives (bonus, advancement) to executives and staff, and productivity, performance and achievement of objectives (with sophisticated measurement and evaluation systems)
- The constant information, guidance and training
- Anthropocentric conception and corporate solidarity
- The careful selection of new staff
- The respect to the client and to the colleague
Below is set out the future plan of personnel in order to cover the human resources needs:
Long-term and short-term plans
Long-term plans
Long-term goals include the expansion of our fleet to 1000 cars all over Greece, as well as the creation of our own substations in every tourist area we have already mentioned. In addition, we aim to develop the incoming (incoming tourism) and also to manage and take advantage of it in every stage of the tourism industry.
It is worthwhile to mention that, we are interested in penetrating into the part that includes hotel units and every other type of tourist accommodation. The return of this investment is considered to be objectively safe, since we already cooperate with a large number of incoming offices. Therefore, it is easy to direct our customers not only to car rentals but also to hire rooms of our own property, given that the construction specifications of our investment will be excellent and the pricing policy will be flexible, affordable and consequently competitive, as far as the Market is concerned.
Apart from the above-mentioned, we are also interested in developing the bus transfer of tourists, a procedure ensured by the tourist agencies that we cooperate with, today but also in the future, both in Greece and abroad. The purchase of buses is indicated as a safe investment with good comparative performance, taking into account the existence of the proper human resources and optimal plenitude, two facts guaranteed by our experience and our cooperations.
Arriving at this point, we certainly need to point out that, exploitation of e-commerce is a basic promotion tool and a driving force of all the afore-mentioned investments, which gives us the possibility to add those “activities” in the already existed websites and thus we can offer a full package (i.e. hotel,bus,car) at very competitive prices.
Our experience so far, which is considered to be imprinted with modern statistics of tendency, performance, allocation and cost, specifies surprising results and rapid development of our penetration rate in the Market ( possession of a growing part of the tourist pie). We don’t have any indication to doubt that in the next three or four years, this investment effort we make will be an absolute success.
Why to choose Olympic-CarRentals.com?
It is very simple. By choosing Olympic-CarRentals.com for your car rental in Crete you guarantee that you are going to pay the lowest amount and that you are going to have the best service available.
How we can offer that?
Simply by combining costs we have managed to given a huge cut to all of our running costs and the beneficiary is YOU!