The way we rent cars is quietly changing, and a recent Skift Studio conversation with Tim Rossanis, Turo's senior vice president for the US, makes the case that the old rental counter model is running out of road.
His core argument: for decades, car rental has been built on fixed locations, generic fleets and rigid processes — travellers adapting to the system rather than the other way round. Turo's pitch is the inverse. You pick the exact car you want, it gets delivered to wherever your trip starts, and you keep it as long as you need. Rossanis is blunt about one industry habit he thinks is past its sell-by date: booking a vehicle only to be handed the same category "or similar" at pickup. When you're spending hours on a road trip with your kids, the specific car actually matters.
The interview also touches on where discovery is heading. Rossanis says true personalisation isn't about offering dozens of choices — it's about understanding intent. The example he gives: you don't want "an SUV", you need a vehicle that fits a family. With AI, he argues, search should feel less like a filter-and-compare chore and more like a conversation. He points to agentic AI as the next shift — imagine telling a booking assistant you need a car for a family ski trip with three kids, a dog and a tight budget, and getting a specific bookable vehicle back. For that to work, he says, companies like Turo need to make their inventory machine-readable so AI agents can match requests to real cars, not just keyword-match categories.
There's a bigger industry story underneath the car talk. Rossanis believes the traditional boundaries — airlines vs airlines, hotels vs hotels, rentals vs rentals — are blurring, because travellers experience a trip as one journey, not as separate reservations. His prediction for the next decade: convenience stops being a premium feature and becomes the baseline. Companies will stop competing on inventory and price alone and start competing on how seamlessly they flex around the individual traveller.
Why does this matter if you're just planning a holiday? Because the trip you're booking next year may look noticeably different. Peer-to-peer car rental already gives you choices a standard counter can't — an exact model, delivery to your hotel or airport, flexible durations, and cars suited to trips a generic fleet doesn't cover. And the personalisation push Rossanis describes is showing up across booking tools everywhere, not just in mobility. If you've ever been burned by an "or similar" upgrade that wasn't, or dragged the family across an airport to a rental depot, the direction of travel here works in your favour. The practical takeaway now: platforms like Turo let you choose the precise vehicle and arrange delivery, and as AI-assisted booking matures, describing your actual needs is set to matter more than clicking through filters.