Nazar Musa

This Middle East operation is now 50 per cent owned by U.S based Sabre Holdings and 50 per cent by Managing Director Nazar Nusa, a 10-year veteran of Holiday Autos where he managed the International Division based in the UK.

Holiday Autos was bought by UK dot-com giant Lastminute.com in 2003 and then sold in July 2005 to US travel firm Sabre Holdings for more than $1 billion.

'I was not happy being part of a UK plc and when the opportunity came to set up in Dubai with a 50% stake I was happy to take the entrepreneurial route again,' says Mr. Nusa. 'The reporting lines of a plc are rather long, and I liked being able to decide what to do myself.

'We established an office in Bur Dubai but are part of the global Holiday Autos network, so our focus is entirely on the marketing and sales of car rentals across the world and more particularly in the Middle East and North Africa and the UAE'.

Holiday Autos Middle East boasts that its website, www.holidayautos.ae delivers the lowest costs for online bookings from the region. A test-drive of the website by AME Info revealed that the lowest cost of a week's car hire in London was $235, an impressive $40 less than the best deal with Hertz, for example.

'People just don't believe that an e-commerce site like ours can exist in Dubai,' says Mr. Musa. 'So we have had to put a lot of effort into convincing travel agents to use our service online, and reward individual agents with $1 Carrefour vouchers for every day booked with us and that is on top of the 15% commission to the agency.

'Our other big success has been in tie-ups with the airline websites, and we now do direct bookings from sites for Emirates, Etihad and Air Arabia, for example. The customer does not know that it is our system doing the booking but this is all great for business and great for the airline too.'

Mr. Musa has also been trying to plug gaps in the local UAE car hire market. He found, for instance, that visiting executives did not necessarily want expensive cars with chauffeurs but were often happy with a Toyota Camry and a driver. The latter works out at a very reasonable $21 a day for the car hire and $43 for the chauffeur service.

'Other people like to have a Porsche for a day at $327. But the main thing about us is that unlike a traditional car hire company we are not working to keep a fleet hired out, or buying and selling cars. What we concentrate on is marketing and selling car hire at the best possible rates around the world.

'This is what we do and the Internet has allowed us to develop an extremely efficient business model, and pass on those benefits to the customer. Sales are presently $3.5 million a year and we expect to reach $10 million in three years from sales offices in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt.'