There are many challenges that rental business owners face daily, and Ondrej Vymetalik is no stranger to these. While running and growing Canary Ride, he began to experience issues with overbooking, automation, and managing inventory across multiple locations. While preparing for the 2022 season, he started using Booqable and has solved many of his problems.
Canary Ride
In 2016, Ondrej founded his motorcycle rental business, Canary Ride, in Gran Canaria, one of the Canary Islands to the south of Spain. The island is known as a miniature continent due to its diverse landscapes featuring volcanoes, forests, beaches, sand dunes, rock cliffs, and natural waterfalls and pools—an idyllic setting with infinite opportunities to explore.
Gran Canaria is perfect for motorcycle exploration and can be experienced year-round thanks to its warm climate. Canary Ride offers a range of motorcycles in varying styles, from Ducati and Honda, which specialize in exploring multiple terrains. They also offer every piece of clothing and gear you need for motorcycling for a small additional cost.
As part of their premium service, customers can also choose to book one of three tours. The first is the Surf & Ride Experience, combining surfing and riding over a six-day trip. The second is the Three Islands Tour, which explores Gran Canaria, Tenerife, and La Gamera over a seven-day trip. Finally, customers can also request a custom tour tailored to their desires.
The challenges of growth
In the early days, before Canary Ride gained popularity, it was easy for Ondrej to keep track of bookings and manage his inventory. However, as the company has grown over the past few years, this has become more and more challenging. One of the biggest issues he has faced is overbooking, as the inventory in his store was not linked to his online store leading to overlaps.
Something else that changed along the way was how he processed bookings and communicated with customers. Again, this task wasn’t difficult when he had to serve a small number of customers. As his business grew, keeping track of inventory, processing payments, and communicating with customers became time-intensive tasks.
In addition, now that Ondrej has experienced success in Gran Canaria with excursions to other islands, he is trying to expand to Tenerife. He had planned to open a second location, but without an efficient rental system, managing inventory between the two locations would be difficult. So, he searched for software to help solve the bulk of his issues.
A system for everything
While preparing for the 2022 season in spring, Ondrej saw Booqable and found that it provided solutions for almost every challenge he faced. He has prevented double bookings, as in-store and online bookings are now hosted in one system with a shared inventory. This allows him and his customers to see what is available at any given time before creating a booking.
It is also much easier to create bookings, reserve motorcycles and equipment, process payments, and communicate with customers. When someone books online, the system automatically creates a booking, reserves items in his inventory, allows them to pay online, and sends a confirmation email. This has significantly reduced the amount of manual work required.
Meanwhile, Ondrej has been able to start making preparations for his second location in Tenerife. Booqable’s multiple locations feature allows him to manage inventory across both stores and even share inventory between the two. At the same time, the iOS app allows him to keep an eye on bookings and see what he has coming up in the following days.
Onwards and upwards
While using Booqable for the 2022 season, Ondrej has seen an increase in bookings as the customer experience, both in-store and online, has been greatly improved. Website visitors love that they can browse through the motorcycles and see what Canary Ride offers and when they are available, so they can be confident in making a decision in the moment.
Now that Ondrej has more time, he has made progress with opening a second location and plans to have it ready for the 2023 season. From there, who knows what he will get up to? Maybe he will open a location on each of the seven islands that make up the Canary islands.
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