Europcar Inspires to Hire with Hot Summer Tweets

Released on: August 5, 2009, 4:35 am
Author: Dominic Dennis
Industry: Transportation & Logistics

Europcar, the UK's leading vehicle hire company has launched 'Hot Summer Tweets', its new Twitter campaign to engage customers during the peak summer months. The Tweets offer inspiration for the hottest places to go and things to do throughout the summer, plus great deals on car hire to get them there.

Danny Higgins, Head of eCommerce for Europcar UK Group said: "We're very keen to explore new platforms such as Twitter to increase our brand awareness and interact with new customers in a very informal and more personal way. While the vast majority of our Tweets concern fun ideas for places to go, our aim is to 'Inspire to hire' and introduce new customers to the idea of hiring a car for their weekend trips and UK holidays. This is all part of our objective to be the most consumer focused car hire company in the UK."

Europcar's Twitter content and strategy was developed with web designers Fortune Cookie with ideas for daily Hot Summer Tweets being created by Europcar's Marketing team. Customers can follow hotsummer tweets from links on the homepage of the Europcar website and Europcar's customer email campaigns.

Danny Higgins continued: "From car hire to Edinburgh Festival to open air cinema screenings we want our ideas to have a broad appeal for Twitter users. We will also look to 'tweet' special offers we want to promote although we understand the importance of providing content that's of genuine value rather than just pushing a sales message. It's still early days but it all serves to give Europcar a bit of a personal touch as part of our integrated on and offline marketing strategy".

Ends

About Europcar:
Europcar is the European leader in passenger car and van hire. The company serves business and leisure customers throughout Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region. Since March 2007 with the acquisition of Vanguard EMEA, its network comprises over 5,300 rental outlets in 160 countries. The Europcar fleet has an average CO2 of 158g/km compared to the average UK car parc* which has 164.9 g/km CO2. Europcar is the first company to win the World Travel Award for "the World's Leading Green Transport Solution Company." Today, over 99% of Europcar's fleet is certified "Euro IV" or above - the most stringent applicable European Union standards in terms of energy consumption and emissions.

Excluding franchise operations, in 2008 Europcar signed more than 10 million rental contracts, with 8,000 employees and a fleet exceeding 225,000 vehicles. In September 2008, Europcar and U.S. market leader Enterprise Rent a Car joined forces in a strategic alliance to form the world's largest car rental network, with more than 1.2 million vehicles and 13,000 locations around the world.

* Based on 2007 figures from SMMT

For further press information please contact:
Dominic Dennis
HSL
Churcham House
1 Bridgeman Road
Teddington
Middlesex
TW11 9AJ
Tel: 020 8977 9132
Fax: 020 8977 5200
www.europcar.co.uk