Rentalcars.com have been trading for 10 years and in true Rentalcars.com style we marked the occasion with a big party. Greg Wills, one of the founding partners came along and told us some funny stories about the early days before we danced into the small hours of the morning.
We like to think we are 'Anything but Ordinary', so we decided to take a different approach to choosing our company values. We got the whole business involved with live music in the office every day, fancy dress, desk decoration, competitions and a video booth. This generated thousands of pieces of feedback which will help define the values that we hold dear, watch this space for the result.
Independent trade association Manchester Digital has announced the appointment of its new Chair. Graham Benson, CIO of Rentalcars.com, will take up the position and steer the organisation through its next phase of growth. Graham has vast experience in building businesses through creative use of technology, and delivering strategic eCommerce and IT-enabled business transformation in both high-growth and turn-around organisations.
On the 2nd of May 2015, rentalcars.com opened their second Manchester office at 35 Fountain Street. IT, Web Development, HR, Talent, Marketing, Finance and Product and Commercial all moved to an incredible new office which has been designed to fit the needs of the business. The space these departments left behind at Sunlight House will be taken over by the Contact centre and refurbished.
Dubai, UAE – March 17, 2015 – Dubai Airports today announced that it has partnered with rentalcars.com, the world’s largest car rental booking platform, to provide passengers with an easy and cost effective way to rent a car directly from the Dubai Airports website, www.dubaiairports.ae.
We are excited to announce our soon to open second office on Fountain street in Manchester city centre. Our new office is in addition to our offices at Sunlight House, where we currently employ around 1,000 people. The new base will allow rentalcars.com to create another 200 jobs in Manchester in 2015 alone. Ian Brown, CEO, rentalcars.com said: “We’re very excited about moving into 35 Fountain Street. The facilities in the building are excellent. It’s hugely important to us that we create the best possible working environment for the talented and committed colleagues who are key to our success."
The Priceline group was awarded 4th place in Fortune's list of most admired companies (Internet services and retail category). This list placed the group just behind Google, Amazon and Facebook. http://fortune.com/worlds-most-admired-companies
We were very proud to be win the 'Best Employer Website' category at the RAD Awards beating competition from Carphone Warehouse, Avis and BSkyB. And meeting Jimmy Carr was also pretty exciting!
rentalcars.com held our annual Christmas party on the 12th of December with over 700 people in attendance. Our employees had a lot of fun in the photobooth which may or may not have had something to do with the free bar...
Our food drive volunteers did a fantastic job of collecting food donations and selling cake and raffle tickets. As well as all of the food that was kindly donated, we also raised a whopping £600 in cash donations for Salford food bank. Our next charity initiative starts in January.
We were delighted to discover that we have been shortlisted for the 'Best Employer website' category of the RAD Awards 2015. That means this website, the one that you're reading! We're in some great company in the shortlist so fingers crossed for next year!
Our Strategic Partnerships team are getting into the Christmas spirit by bringing home made delicacies from their countries across the world. They're also parading some of the greatest Christmas jumpers we’ve ever seen. As you can see it didn’t take them long to get stuck in!
In the spirit of being festive and helping the local community, we chose to hold a 'festive food drive' to donate much needed supplies to Salford Central foodbank. Our employees have 2 weeks to bring in all that they can spare.
We are pleased to announce a new partnership with Wizz Air. In line with the partnership rentalcars.com vehicles will be available at every airport Wizz Air regularly flies to. Car rentals can be jointly handled with booking a flight, thus the clients can pay for both the rented cars and their airport tickets at the same time.
We were proud to sponsor NUX3, the biggest UX conference in the north of England. Hundreds of people took part in our 'Draw your dream car' competition with one lucky winner taking home an iPad Air2 for her efforts.
We are pleased to announce our involvement with the CodeFirst: Girls initiative. Two of our Designers have volunteered their evenings to teach coding to university students. We're hoping we may help shape some great future talent!
Our new COO, Ian Brown took the opportunity to get all of our employees together for a business update. Everybody had the chance to ask any questions of our Directors, with "Can we have space hoppers?" being the strangest request.
We don't have a dress code but some of our employees really took it to the extreme this Halloween! We had some great fancy dress costumes and our departments were decorated enough to scare even the bravest souls!
On the 15th of September, inspired by Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood, the 9th floor held a charity bake off to raise money for the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital. 17 people put their heart and soul into making delicious cakes and there was not a soggy bottom amongst them. The winner of the bake off were some amazing salted caramel cupcakes sold out in just 38 minutes! Overall the bake off raised an impressive £260.90 and the 9th floor will be on a diet for the foreseeable future.
We are very happy to welcome a new recruiter to our team to help fill our ever growing list of vacancies! James previously worked at rentalcars.com for more than 5 years before leaving to begin a career in recruitment. Now, luckily for us, he's back!
Our MD and COO were over in New York on June 5th to take part in the NASDAQ opening ceremony where The Priceline Group CEO, Darren Huston rang the opening bell.
The rentalcars.com World Cup started in our Call Centre as we decided to let our employees join in the football fun by screening all games and creating a country based competition for the duration of the tournament. With so many nationalities on site, the competition promises to be pretty fierce!
In November 2013 we launched an exclusive car rental partnership with Singapore Airlines – the flag carrier of Singapore and a 5-star airline. It ranks amongst the top 15 worldwide in terms of revenue passenger kilometres and 10th in the world when it comes to international passengers carried. Another great example of strategic partnership for rentalcars.com, the deal is testament to the quality of service and product we offer.
A partnership with Viajanet.com, the leading independent Brazilian online travel agency, was agreed in November of last year. Located in Sao Paulo, the company employs over 120 people across its rapidly growing operations network. ViajaNet provides a wide array of online travel options including flights, hotels, cruises and vacation packages to its consumers. With the 2014 FIFA World Cup just a matter of months away, it’s another excellent result for the business.
Forget Lennon/McCartney – now it’s all about Lennon/rentalcars.com. Why? Because in November 2013 we sealed a deal with Liverpool John Lennon Airport (JLA) that will see us become its exclusive online car rental provider. Car hire will be available via a simple tab and also offered when a customer is booking car parking. JLA is one of the UK’s top 10 busiest airports and handled over 4.5 million passengers in 2012.
The Priceline Group (NASDAQ: PCLN) recently announced the promotion of Darren Huston, 47, to President and Chief Executive Officer. The promotion will split the roles of Chief Executive Officer and Chairman. Jeffery H. Boyd, who has been President and Chief Executive Officer of The Priceline Group since 2002, will remain as Chairman of The Priceline Group’s Board of Directors. Mr. Huston will join The Priceline Group’s Board of Directors, effective from January 1, 2014.