Thinking of leaving Rental Car Manager? What to check before you switch

I have done this move myself. I ran a hire fleet on a legacy booking system, hit the walls one by one, and eventually did the thing everyone puts off: I switched. So this is not a pitch dressed up as advice. It is the checklist I wish someone had handed me before I started, written for an operator who has already half-decided to leave Rental Car Manager and wants to do it without dropping a booking.

I will say the fair thing up front. Rental Car Manager is an established system that runs a lot of fleets, and if it is working for you, none of this applies. But the reasons operators give for leaving it are consistent, and they are worth naming honestly because they are the things you should test before you commit to anything new.

Be honest about why you are actually leaving

Before you look at a single alternative, write down what is actually driving you. The complaints operators publish about Rental Car Manager cluster into four themes, and they are worth being specific about because a new vendor should be judged against exactly these:

• The daily interface. Reviewers describe it as clunky and outdated, with a booking view that is hard to work in. This is the one that costs you every single day, which is also why it is easy to stop noticing.
• Being charged to change things. The recurring line is being asked for money "every time you ask to fix something." Whatever you move to, find out what a change or a fix costs before you are mid-season and need one.
• Off-season billing. Being billed the same whether you have a full fleet on the road in January or three cars out in July. For a seasonal business that is real money.
• Support. "Very bad customer service" comes up more than once. When a booking goes wrong on a Saturday, the quality of the person on the other end is the whole product.

If your reasons are on this list, good — they are concrete and testable. If they are not, write down what they are. Vague dissatisfaction makes for a bad switch, because you cannot check whether the new thing fixes it.

Check what you can actually get out

The single biggest determiner of how smooth a migration is turns out to be boring: what your current system will export, and in what shape.

You want, at minimum, a CSV of your bookings and a CSV of your fleet. For bookings, the fields that matter are the customer's name and email, the pickup and return dates and times, the vehicle, the total in NZD, and — this one is easy to overlook — your booking reference. That reference is what lets a new system match its records back to your old ones and avoid creating duplicates if you import twice.

Confirm the export path in Rental Car Manager before you plan anything else. Is it self-serve, or do you have to request it? Does it come out as one file or several? Any field that will not export cannot be migrated, so this is the step that tells you the true size of the job. Do one real export early and look at it, rather than assuming.

Two things almost never come out of a CSV, and you should plan around them from the start: uploaded documents and photos (licence scans, signed agreements, damage images) and payment history. Booking, customer and vehicle data migrates cleanly. Historical media and the record of who has already paid what are a separate, hands-on conversation — not a self-serve upload. If you have a lot of future bookings with deposits already paid, that reconciliation is the part most likely to take longer than you expect, so surface it on day one.

Test the things you are leaving over, not the demo

A demo is designed to look good. Your job while evaluating is to test the specific frictions you are leaving over. Set up a small slice of your real business and actually run it:

1. Load a real week. Put in a handful of genuine upcoming bookings and see how the daily booking view feels when it is your data, not a polished sample. This is the complaint you are leaving over — test it directly.
2. Reprice for a season. Change your rates the way you would for winter, or for a long weekend in the middle of a peak block. If pricing is a calendar where you type a number into every day, you will feel it here.
3. Run a bond end to end. Take a bond, hold it through a hire, then release it minus a small charge with evidence attached. This is where a lot of systems quietly fall back to "take a payment and refund it later," which is not the same thing.
4. Break something on purpose and ask for help. Send a real support question while you are evaluating and time the answer. You are testing the support experience, not just the software.
5. Put the booking widget on a test page. Confirm it drops into the site and domain you already have, so your website and its search rankings do not have to move for you to switch.

Questions to ask any new vendor

Ask these of anyone, including me. The answers tell you more than a feature list:

• What does it cost to change or fix something after I have signed up? You are leaving a per-fix charge behind; do not walk into another one.
• How is it priced across a season? If your fleet shrinks in winter, does the bill? A price set by active fleet behaves very differently from a flat seat count.
• Who owns the company, and who answers the phone? Rental Car Manager was founded in New Zealand, but since 2023 it has been part of the global Jonas Software group, an operating group of the Canadian-listed Constellation Software. Independent and locally owned is a real difference if it matters to you — so ask.
• What exactly migrates, and what is a manual job? A straight answer here — including "photos and payment history are hands-on, not automatic" — is a sign of an honest vendor. A promise that everything comes across at the click of a button is a sign of the opposite.
• Can I run both systems in parallel and cut over on my own timeline? If the answer is no, the switch is riskier than it needs to be.

Do the maths on staying versus switching

The reason people stay too long is that each individual annoyance is small. A booking view that costs you two minutes a booking. A fix you got charged for once. An off-season month billed at peak rates. None of them is worth a migration on its own.

Add them up over a year. The daily-interface tax, multiplied by every booking. The change fees. The difference between flat billing and a price that scales down when your fleet does. Set that annual number against the one-off cost of a switch — which is mostly your own time over a week or two, not money — and the picture usually looks very different from the one you carry around in your head.

How the switch actually runs

If you do decide to go, the shape of a sensible migration is the same every time, and it is far less dramatic than the thing you are dreading. Get your workspace, locations and fleet set up first. Import your bookings and customers from your export and read the preview carefully, especially the dates. Put the booking widget on your existing site so new bookings start landing in the new system while the old one keeps running. Reconcile the numbers. Then pick your cutover week and switch when you are confident, not before.

No big-bang weekend, no going dark, and a person to call for the parts you do together.

If Glovebox is on your shortlist, I have written the like-for-like version of this comparison — booking view, pricing, ownership, support, and how the data migration works — on the Rental Car Manager alternative page. Send us a sample export and we will tell you exactly how it maps. Whatever you choose, do the export test early and run the two systems in parallel. That is the difference between a nervous switch and a boring one, and boring is what you want.