Driver Rent a Car

Driver is a rent-a-car company with branches across Montenegro. Before this project, bookings arrived by phone, by email and through social media. Each of those channels works, but none of them knows what the others are doing: availability is checked by hand, the price is worked out in conversation, and confirmation goes out only when somebody in the office gets to look at the schedule. In season, with enquiries arriving non-stop and in several languages, that model eats the entire working day.

There is a quieter problem too: a booking without payment is only an intention. As long as everything ends in a message, the company has no confirmation that the guest is serious, and the guest has no proof that the car is really being held. Add vehicles picked up at one branch and returned at another, and a manually kept schedule will sooner or later produce two bookings for the same car.

The brief was therefore wider than building a rent-a-car website: the entire process had to move online — from searching for available vehicles to taking payment — so that a reservation no longer needs manual confirmation and the company always knows the real state of its fleet.

The booking system is built as a reservation in four steps: dates and pick-up location, vehicle choice from genuinely available stock, driver details and, finally, payment. Those four steps are not a design flourish but a promise to the guest — at any moment they can see where they are, how much is left and what they will pay, which removes the drop-off that happens when a flow feels endless.

The vehicle offer does not come from a static list but from a Renteon integration. The system checks fleet availability in real time and prices the exact dates requested, so a guest only ever chooses between cars that are truly free. That removes the most expensive mistake in this business — a confirmed booking for a car that has already gone out.

Payment runs through the Bankart gateway with 3D Secure, so a guest confirms the reservation by card immediately, on the company’s own site. After a successful transaction, automated email notifications through Mailgun reach both the guest and the office, so confirmation no longer depends on who happens to be at a desk. Prices are quoted in euros across every channel.

The system also handles logistics between branches, including one-way rentals — picked up in one town, returned in another — because travellers crossing Montenegro ask for it often, and for the company it is a question of moving cars around, not only of pricing.

The site is multilingual: Montenegrin, English and Russian. It is not just the home page that is translated but the whole reservation flow, the terms and the confirmations, because a guest paying by card has to understand every step before taking it.

A separate part of the work was making sure the offer page did not turn into a form. Vehicles are presented the way guests actually choose them — by class, by size, by the kind of trip — while rental terms and payment details sit alongside the choice, so the decision is made with everything on one screen. By the time a guest reaches the payment step, nothing about the price is new to them.

The site is built in PHP on the ASEngine framework, with a jQuery front end and Bootstrap as the design foundation. The choice is deliberate: booking and payment are part of the same system, so availability, pricing and transaction logic live in one place instead of in a layer maintained separately.

The Renteon API integration connects the site to the fleet records, which means availability and prices reflect the real situation rather than an assumption. Payment is a distinct, clearly bounded step: card data is handled on the Bankart gateway side with a 3D Secure check, and the system follows the transaction status before it confirms a reservation. Mailgun carries the automated notifications so confirmations do not depend on unreliable delivery.

Technical SEO and speed optimisation were part of the build — address structure, titles, language versions and loading time — because a booking flow only matters if the guest reaches it at all. Maintenance and technical support remain part of the arrangement: a system that takes card payments should not be left unattended after handover.

Driver now receives bookings that are finished: the vehicle is genuinely available, the price has been calculated for those exact dates, and payment has passed a 3D Secure check. The office no longer has to confirm each reservation by hand or check the schedule before replying — the system does that at the moment the guest picks a car.

For the guest, the waiting is gone. They can complete a booking at any hour, in their own language, and receive an emailed confirmation instead of a promise that somebody will get back to them. When pick-up and drop-off are in different towns, that is part of the same flow rather than a separate arrangement.

The company has gained a channel that works when nobody is working, with records that stay in order through the busiest weeks. Phone and messages still exist for guests who prefer them, but they are no longer the only route to a booking — and no longer carry the weight they used to.

Commercially, a card-paid reservation on the company’s own site means it shares the guest with no intermediary: the booking data, the communication and the terms all stay in house. When it comes time to widen the offer, add a branch or add another language, what changes is content inside the system, not the way the whole business runs.

See how we build reservation and payment systems for rent-a-car→