Europcar South Africa News

If you book a vehicle with Europcar on the SAA website before 31 May, and complete your rental before 31 May 2013, you stand a chance to win a Kia Picanto.

April 2013. Europcar adds an emergency medical transportation product, with a starting price of R20/day, for travel in SA, Nam, Lesotho, Swaziland & Botswana.

March 2013. Europcar adds the letter "e" to its "moving your way" logo. The new logo takes flight with Kulula on the livery of its new B737-800.

28 January 2013. Europcar donates a VW Polo BlueMotion to SANParks. "Climate change is a big threat to biodiversity conservation and, as a company, we feel that by supporting tourism and conservation in a constructive way, we can make a positive and meaningful difference. Over the past few years we have made great strides in reducing our carbon footprint at our depots, throughout our operations and in our vehicle fleet. We encourage our customers also to travel responsibly and understand how their travel carbon footprint is potentially impacting on the environment. Europcar is committed to making a positive difference to our people, our customers and our planet. We are encouraging everyone to plant trees to offset their travel emissions. Europcar will match all tree gifts up until the end of February, so for everyone who gives a tree through this portal, we'll also plant one." said the CE of Europcar, Ms Dawn Nathan-Jones. 

23 January 2013. Customers never see the software & servers behind a car rental company's data center, so miss the advances. Europcar has created a private cloud using the Windows Server 2012 operating system, Dell hardware and the Microsoft System Center 2012 data center solutions. Europcar estimates that this has resulted in an 85% more efficient IT system, 35% lower operating costs, 25% less data center energy costs and reduced disaster recovery from 120 to 15 minutes.

January 2013. Europcar revamps their website to make it easier for customers to book, in 3 steps.

November 2012. Europcar are the main car sponsor for the Momentum 94.7 cycle race, and a team of Europcar staff take part, with George Corbett pulling Lewis Wynne along (they'd donated prosthetics to him a year earlier).

24 - 28 June 2012 : Europcar provides safety vehicles & Tour de france replica cycling vests for the King David High School Cycle Tour.

Feb 2012 : Europcar South Africa donates artificial limbs to Lewis Wynne, a 5 year old who had his legs crushed when a tree fell through his classroom in October 2011.

19 Dec 2011 : Thembela Makiza is appointed as Europcar's new Customer Experience Manager. Thembela has a diploma in Marketing & Business Management from Damelin, and a BCom degree in Marketing from the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. Europcar SA's Chief Executive Officer, Dawn Nathan-Jones, says that "Our customers are the life-blood of our business, which is why providing excellent customer service is vital to building the loyalty factor as well as enticing new customers.  Our culture is one of consistent improvement and evolution, and we view the customer experience as a key success factor in enhancing our brand promise which is to make car rental personal, easy and enjoyable."

13 Dec 2011 : Europcar donates artificial legs to a 5-year-old boy, who had to have his legs amputated, when a tree fell into his classroom.  The Chief Executive Officer of Europcar, Dawn Nathan-Jones, said “When we heard about Lewis’ story we were immediately moved and touched by the ordeal that the little boy had gone through and knew that we had to try and do our bit to help him and his family. Lewis is a positive, courageous and brave young boy that seems to have taken everything in his stride.  His father, who was at his bedside since the accident happened, has been a pillar of strength for the young boy and we are happy that we could do our little bit to help them cope during this difficult time.”

12 Dec 2011 : A new Europcar branch has been opened in Maun (Botswana's 3rd largest town). The Chief Executive Officer of Europcar, Dawn Nathan-Jones, said “We are constantly committed to providing our customers with excellent service and we are delighted to enhance our offering to our customers.  We look forward to experiencing continued growth in the region and ensuring that both our commercial and tourist business to and in Maun benefit from our added services as well as contributing to Botswana’s economic growth through tourism.”

2 Aug 2011 : Europcar is named the official supplier of the Tshwane - Johannesburg leg of the Gautrain. Europcar South Africa's Operations Director, George Corbett, says that “By being present in the stations on the Tshwane-Johannesburg route, Europcar will deliver car-rental opportunities for commuters who require flexibility once they have reached their destination station." Europcar doesn't have nearby car-hire kiosks (Marlboro or Rhodesfield stations), cars are delivered to the stations, for a nominal fee.

14 Feb 2011 : Europcar tells us about themselves: "What is great customer service? The people behind the counter. Prompt service. 'The personal service that you get from people like Elvis. It's fantastic, I don't go to another car hire company and haven't been for the last 10 years. I don't know how long Elvis has been here, but it feels like 10 years'. 'The company's 31 years old. We operate in South Africa and 4 other countries in the SADC region. We have a fleet size of nearly 15,000 vehicles and we have a staff of just over a thousand people. 'The big thing in our business, in all the markets we serve is speed and accuracy. One of the promises that we make to our customers is gone in 30 seconds.' Dawn Nathan-Jones, CEO of Europcar South Africa. 'The car rental industry in South Africa is very competitive. We have 10 major brands at all major airports. It puts the pressure on price, and a lot of our customers demand services that we haven't had in the past, which is highly reliant on a technology platform that can deliver those services. With the new hardware our sales staff are a lot more mobile, doing less admin work and an ability to present to the customer and sort out customer queries on the spot. We do monitor our sales staff in terms of their movement. We track what they're doing. If anything, the productivity has almost doubled'. Peter Retief, Europcar's General Manager for Leisure.

'Our technology is what enables our staff member to provide a more efficient and speedy service to our customer. The Dell consultants came with an extreme amount of knowledge, they understood my business and my needs and came back with a solution that was far beyond what I required, but enabled me to be more productive and provide more efficiencies for my business. Virtualisation is key for us. We're a company which believes in going green and by going green means bringing your efficiencies up with the least amount of carbon footprint. And virtualisation brings 2 additional resources which is high availability and DR (disaster recovery), and we need to keep our systems up and running at all time to provide the efficiencies and the customer tools for our staff. (Our version of) Windows comes with a hyperview virtualisation platform built into it that brings your IT agility and your return on investment is a lot higher. So this is why we chose hyperview - centralised management console, we can manage any environment, any server from one central place. We can deploy a server to business within 45 minutes, present it with storage and in production within 45 minutes on a Dell Virtual Environment. Before the virtual technologies, we would have about a 6 week turnaround time for the procurement of hardware to implementation and installation. We have consolidated our server infrastructure by 46%. We currently run 53 virtual servers on 5 servers. We needed a solution that would give us snapshotting and disk replication to give us high availability and disaster recovery. Technologies that are provided with the storage are phenomenal, especially the on-fly expansion of device drives. We can present additional lungs to the servers without impacting service. We have 138 branches within South Africa, so we needed to enable our staff to communicate on a platform that was more interactive and more productive than using a telephone system. So as you can see I can have a conversation with my staff, no matter where they are in the country or around the world, by simply having a video conversation.' Shaun Phillips, Europcar South Africa's General Manager IT Operations and Infrastructure.

'And that's what makes Europcar stand out - they recognise and make it simple for customers to interact with them. When you make use of their services it's quick, things happen fast, their staff are great, and it's a wonderful company to work with.' Gidon Novick, Joint CEO of Kulula and British Airways South Africa.