by Chris Witmer
posted on January 6, 2017
2016 was another exciting year of explosive growth for Turo. Our community more than doubled in the last year with over 2 million signups and tens of thousands of new listings. Our wins are ultimately your wins and that’s why most of our enhancements last year came directly from all of you. In the last year, we met up with over 800 members at 16 fabulous community parties across the US and Canada.
FROM CAR MUSEUMS TO URBAN WINERIES…
Denver (April 2016)
Chicago (May 2016)
PICNICKING IN THE PARK OR JUST HAVING A BALL…
Boston (June 2016)
New York City (June 2016)
WE LOVED CONNECTING WITH ALL OF YOU AND WANT TO THANK YOU…
Seattle (July 2016)
Philadelphia (September 2016)
Washington DC (September 2016)
FOR BEING SUCH A VIBRANT, INSPIRATIONAL COMMUNITY!
Los Angeles (September 2016)
Miami (November 2016)
While our meetups are certainly a fun way for us to say thanks for all your hard work, the connections we made drive exciting changes to our marketplace too. In fact, a lot of feedback and ideas shared were already implemented this year.
The new dashboard
Our most active members asked for more detailed and timely information to be accessible from a single view, so we reimagined the dashboard into two efficient feeds: “Upcoming” (what trips are happening each day) and “Activity” (pending requests and recent notifications/messages). The feeds can also be filtered by vehicle to allow owners with multiple listings to further simplify their to-do lists.
Listing upgrades
The secret to a great listing? It’s all in the (structured) details. Owners can now enhance their listings to highlight their car’s features and better anticipate potential questions or any other operational nuances.
The reputation system also received a similar overhaul that offers private feedback to both the Turo team and the review’s recipient. The published portion of the review is also now double-blind to encourage impartiality.
Customized availability settings
Many of the owners we met with this year lamented some trip requests didn’t necessarily align with their schedules that changed from day to day. With the addition of “Owner settings”, hosts can now specify the hours they’re around to meet by day of the week and have these settings applied to each of their listings without any particular calendar dates needed.
Location was likewise a factor for many owners offering delivery, so now you can adjust your required advanced notice and Book Instantly settings by location in your car’s “Trip preferences”. To optimize the types of requests received, duration minimums were expanded and adjusted to include weekends, too.
More flexibility
Owners have yearned for a bit more time to request reimbursements for tolls and tickets, so now they have a full 30 days. Additional time was also granted to late-night trip requests that come in between 10 pm and 2 am so owners now have until 10 am the next day to respond.
We extended the same latitude to our community with more vehicle protection options as well. Each tiered protection level still offer the same $1 million coverage in liability and physical damage protection up to the car’s actual cash value. Alternatively, owners can now extend their own commercial rental policy to their guests instead.
What’s next?
Stay tuned for a community party coming to a city near you in 2017.
In the meantime, we’d like to ask for some additional input but this time it’s all about you. Please take a few moments to tell us how Turo fits into your life to help us create even more exciting changes that will make our community even better.
Chris Witmer
Chris is the Community Manager at Turo. He’s a proud father to three rescue dogs and has become immune to jet lag in all his travels (or maybe it’s just the coffee).
