Chinese startup races after China’s globetrotting tourists with overseas car rental service

Nearly 100 million tourists ventured outside of mainland China in 2013, and the figure for this year is going to be even higher. A number of Chinese startups see this foreign holiday boom as a new business opportunity, even catering to the traveling hordes while they’re far outside of China. One such startups in this space is car rental portal HuiZuChe.

The site specializes in overseas car rental listings, partnering with more than 10 well-known auto rental services – such as Hertz and Avis – to cover about 180 countries and areas that support drivers with Chinese licenses hitting the roads, according to local tech blog 36Kr. HuiZuChe’s main pulling point is that it’s all in Chinese, meaning that holiday-makers don’t have to grapple with websites in English or some other language in order to make a booking.

That also means the startup provides an easy, one-stop way to evaluate rental prices and lots of other options across all the major services. HuiZuChe makes money from a cut of each booking.

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The startup says that about 40 percent of its car rentals are for the US, amounting to about 90,000 rides per month across the States by Chinese tourists and businesspeople. That means the site is processing over 200,000 bookings per month across the world.

Rival site ZuZuChe is doing the same thing, even aggregating from many of the same big rental players.

Aside from the obvious opportunity for travel websites, other web-based services are following China’s tourists overseas as well. China’s top on-demand car site, Yongche, recently indicated that it’s set to launch in San Francisco and New York in a challenge to Uber. It’ll recruit Chinese-speaking limo drivers so as to target the sizable Chinese leisure and business travel market in the US

(Source: 36Kr)