Avis Rent A Car System

Background

Avis Rent A Car System, Inc. and its subsidiaries operate the world’s second largest general-use car rental business, providing business and leisure customers with a wide range of services at more than 1,700 locations in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Latin American/Caribbean region. Avis is recognized as the industry leader in applying new technologies and is one of the world's top brands for customer loyalty.

Challenge

Avis Rental Systems process 17.1 million reservation transactions annually. The company receives about one million unique users monthly and avis.com accounts for a growing share of Avis’ more than $2 billion in annual bookings. Canadian customers account for the second largest volume of Avis customers worldwide. As such, Avis needed to roll out avis.com into French for North America in order to better serve these clients. Avis brought Translations.com on board for the job. During the localization process into French, the new Avis English site was also being developed, resulting in a constant shifting of content for inclusion on the French site.

• Half a million words needed to be localized within a dynamic authoring process and under tight time restrictions
• Over 50 percent of avis.com content text strings reside in an Oracle database. Any localization process must be able to identify which strings are localizable within the database so as not to break text strings or waste linguistic efforts
• Submitting localized content back into the database without losing special characters and strings is also a significant challenge

Solution

A technical solution was needed to facilitate and track changes to the avis.com site. This solution had to include a fast and safe method to move files to the appropriate resources during each phase of the project. This same solution also had to work in Avis’ current environment and with the site developer’s software.

Installation of GlobalLink software at Avis was the solution.

• GlobalLink works directly within the TeamSite UI, which Avis uses to manage the company’s website content.
• UI integration significantly decreases the time needed to train content managers on GlobalLink, as they are already familiar with the TeamSite UI.
• GlobalLink automates file extraction from TeamSite, submission and retrieval from the Translations.com FTP server, and reintegration into TeamSite, thereby accelerating the localization process.
• GlobalLink provides change detection functionality that produces reports on new content and edited content, which eases the burden on managers by providing snapshots of progress on a file level at all stages of the initiative.
• GlobalLink’s Database Adaptor enables business users at Avis to select content for localization without requiring the assistance of a database administrator. This was important in keeping the project on track, as content additions through GlobalLink could be translated within 24 hours.

As a result of implementing GlobalLink and outsourcing content localization to Translations.com, Avis has successfully created four additional language versions of the site, with more on the way. Updates to the English site are synchronized with the multilingual sites through the same GlobalLink configuration and Avis estimates that GlobalLink saves the company the equivalent of more than 4,000 man-hours each year.

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