Car rental revenue management is a complex world for all car rental operators. For about 10 years, at WeYield, we have been addressing the challenge of optimizing rental revenue with our Yield management expertise and Carmax, our decision tool. In late 2013, we started the discussion to improve the static display of Carmax to the dynamism of the web. So CocktailRM was on its way. But why did we move to the SAAS-cloud environment?

First, our various clients around the world need to get their piloting reports whenever they want to read them. Nowadays, and for many years, we retrieve data from their operating system (see note below) on a weekly basis, digesting tenth thousands of lines into Access and update the reports on Excel. Even if it has been pretty efficient to run the activity optimization for so many years, it is a matter of fact that the business decision can not wait to receive the weekly pdf reports any longer. The competition is tough and requires to be alerted in a smart way on any big changes on the booking trends to take immediate yield management actions.

Second, honestly, we are fed up with Excel and Access to manage all the piloting reports that we supply every week to our existing clients. Manipulating a huge volume of data for many clients simultaneously is complex and requires a lot of technical and human resources. And every version of Carmax is designed for one client’s need. Therefore, we can not deploy a new functionality made for one to all the others back.

So moving on the web was an obvious choice. We started to test our concept on competitive rate shopping. With the support of Bpi-Osseo, a French funding bank, we developed Rateshaker. Used by more than 50 clients covering 10 car rental brands, we realized the first online rate shop analyzer using data canvassed by QL2 or RateGain. Released in May 2014, we are already provided the third version.

So, as of Spring 2014, we greeted some investors enabling WeYield to build an IT department dedicated to web applications run by Pierre-Nicolas Tollitte, Ph.D. in Computer Science. After months of building the databases, developing the structure, we are proud to release CocktailRM this spring 2014.

Nota: our sources of data are currently RentWay from JimpiSoft, Cars+ from Thermeon, CarSystem from Sofico, RentCar from HiTech, Wheels from Invensys, and other interfaces. From these systems, we build an automatic daily feed to extract rental operation data (reservations, rental agreements, and invoices).