For years, mobility brands competed on fleets, availability and price. But as consumer expectations evolve, the real battleground is shifting from the vehicle itself to the experience surrounding it.
From flexible ownership models and digital-first journeys to the growing importance of trust and personalisation, mobility is becoming less about renting a car and more about building an ongoing customer relationship.
In this conversation, Amit Kumar, General Manager at Thrifty Car Rental, explores how data, customer insights and brand experience are reshaping mobility in the GCC, and why the brands that understand customer behaviour beyond the transaction will be the ones that win the next generation of consumers.
Excerpts from the interview below:
Beyond operational insights, how does data from customer interactions help Thrifty better understand customer needs and shape the overall brand experience?
Summer is the period for honest diagnostics of the business and processes. Between June and September, our focus is on process improvement and policy fine-tuning to meet the unspoken customer expectations in business.
We’ve learned that the operational data tells us what broke, and the interaction data tells us why it mattered. A spike in roadside assistance calls is an engineering signal. But the transcripts behind those calls where the customer was, who was in the car, what they were trying to get to are a brand signal. It changes the question from ‘how fast did we recover the vehicle?’ to ‘how well did we protect the customer’s day?’
We treat contact centre notes, post-rental feedback, extension requests and complaint categories as one continuous dataset rather than separate operational reports, which has produced some of our most useful decisions, like pre-emptive cooling and battery checks ahead of peak heat. Proactive delivery to the customer instead of counter collection during peak hours, and communications that anticipate rather than apologise.
The brand outcome is the important part. Customers don’t experience our fleet policy or our maintenance cycle; they experience whether Thrifty felt prepared for the day they had. Data is how we make preparedness systematic instead of accidental.
How is Thrifty positioning itself as more than a rental company and building a stronger mobility brand?
The category label has become less useful than the customer need behind it. Many people in the UAE want access to the right vehicle for a defined period, with terms that match their life stage, so now people no longer prefer “a rental”.
That period can be three days for a visitor, three months for a new arrival on a probation contract, three years for a corporate fleet, or permanent for someone ready to buy. Thrifty’s position is that we should be able to serve a customer across that entire arc without them leaving the group.
Practically, that means daily and weekly rental sits alongside long-term leasing, monthly subscription, corporate leasing, and, through ARENCO Automotive’s wider ecosystem, that includes pathways into ownership such as lease-to-own, where a customer can rent with Thrifty, subscribe when their needs change, and buy when they’re ready.
The brand shift that follows is subtle but decisive direction; we stop marketing transactions and start marketing continuity. The measure of success now is whether the customer’s second, third, and fourth mobility decision also happens inside our ecosystem.
How does Thrifty build trust through customer experience, communications and brand storytelling?
In this market, trust is built in moments of friction, such as when the customer pays the deposit, undergoes a damage assessment, receives a traffic fine, requests an extension, or returns the vehicle.
Our approach is to over-engineer exactly those moments. Transparent, itemised pricing with no conditional charges introduced late. Deposits handled strictly as pre-authorisations and released within the timelines the Department of Economy and Tourism has set, so that there is no silence when the customer expects a confirmation. Photographic condition reporting at handover and return, shared with the customer, so damage discussions are evidential rather than adversarial, and Salik and fine handling that is transparent.
We follow the same rule with our communication with the customer as well. We tell them what will happen before it happens, particularly around anything that touches their money. Most rental disputes in this region are more about the surprises and hidden fees than the money itself.
On storytelling, we’ve deliberately moved away from aspirational imagery that any operator could claim. The stories we believe worth telling are operational and human. For example, the delivery team working through a 48-degree afternoon, the airport shift that repatriated a family’s luggage, the corporate client we’ve served for a decade. Credibility in mobility is earned in specifics, not adjectives.
How is Thrifty using technology and customer insights to improve engagement and create more personalised experiences?
Two priorities: remove steps, and stop treating unlike customers alike.
On removing steps, digital booking, digital licence and document verification, e-contracts, contactless collection, and delivery to the customer’s location. The benchmark GCC consumers apply to us is the standard set by regional banking, delivery and ride-hailing apps rather than another rental company. WhatsApp in particular has become a primary service channel, and we’ve built around that reality.
On personalisation, a leisure visitor, a newly arrived resident, a returning corporate account, and a long-term lease customer have almost nothing in common except that they need a vehicle. Our CRM segmentation is built to reflect different offers, different renewal logic, different communication cadence, and different service expectations.
The insight layer matters more than the technology layer. Any operator can buy a booking engine. What’s harder to replicate is knowing, from behavioural data, which customers are likely to extend versus switch, which corporate accounts are drifting before they say so, and which first-time renters are actually early-stage ownership prospects. That’s where the commercial value sits.
What are the biggest opportunities and challenges for mobility brands in the GCC, and how do you see marketing playing a bigger role?
The opportunities are structural. The GCC has a highly transient, young, digitally fluent population with genuinely uncertain time horizons, which is close to a perfect market for flexible mobility. Tourism ambitions across the region remain aggressive. Corporate fleets are steadily being outsourced. And attitudes to ownership are softening, as a growing share of residents see a vehicle as a subscription decision.
The challenges are equally clear. The rental category is fragmented and price-led, which drives commoditisation. Aggregators and OTAs increasingly sit between the operator and the customer, and whoever owns that relationship owns the margin. Residual value volatility affects fleet economics directly. And 2026 has reminded everyone in this region that demand can be interrupted by factors entirely outside the sector’s control.
Marketing’s role changes accordingly. Historically, it was to capture the demand and win the search and the booking. That function is being automated and commoditised. The durable role has now changed to building a brand strong enough that customers come to us directly, and owning the customer data and relationship that makes retention possible. In a market where the product is largely comparable, brand and experience are the only defensible margin.
How has consumer behaviour changed since 1 March?
The first half of 2026 brought a period of regional adjustment, and what stands out to us is how quickly both customers and the sector adapted. The changes we’ve observed since March are, on balance, ones we expect to persist.
The clearest shift has been toward flexibility as a purchase criterion. Customers now evaluate providers on amendment and cancellation terms, not just headline rate, and that has pushed the whole market toward more accommodating, more transparent policies. That is a healthy development, and one we have leaned into rather than resisted.
The second is the strength of domestic and intra-GCC travel. Road-based leisure from Dubai to Abu Dhabi, Ras Al Khaimah, Hatta, and Oman has grown into a genuine demand stream in its own right, supported by staycation activity across the UAE hospitality sector. It has opened a segment we now build product and campaigns around deliberately.
The broader lesson for us is that a mobility business built across visitor, resident, corporate and long-term customers is resilient by design. That diversification and the recalibration that came with it have left Thrifty in a stronger operating position than at the start of the year.
What mobility trends can you identify in the GCC market?
Seven that we’re actively planning around:
- Flexible ownership is becoming mainstream. Subscription and long-term leasing have evolved from a niche offering for expatriates on short contracts into a rational default for a large segment of residents.
- The rent–subscribe–own continuum is consolidating. Customers expect a single provider to serve them across that journey rather than forcing them to switch.
- Digital first is now table stakes, with a regional accent. Messaging platforms WhatsApp above all are where GCC customers actually want to transact and resolve issues.
- Corporate fleet outsourcing continues to accelerate, as businesses move vehicles off the balance sheet and treat mobility as a managed service.
- Electrification is advancing, but gated by infrastructure and residual values rather than by consumer appetite. Rental and subscription are becoming the primary way people trial EVs before committing.
- Autonomy is moving from concept to regulation. With Dubai targeting a quarter of all journeys to be autonomous by 2030 and a Level 4 framework now in place, this is a planning horizon, not a thought experiment.
- Used car transparency is reshaping expectations across the sector. Standards being set in retail inspection, warranty, and verified history are increasingly what customers expect from rental and leasing providers too.
