Orlando
About Smarter Car Hire Florida
We are a small UK team with decades of combined Florida travel experience, enough to know exactly what customers need and expect from their Florida car hire.
Who We Are
Smarter Car Hire Florida launched in 2026, but the story behind it starts much earlier.
Garry
Garry co-owns both Direct Villas Florida and Smarter Car Hire Florida. As the owner of a successful IT company, he understands the daily frustrations that consumers and suppliers experience and why good technology, properly applied, can resolve them.
Garry visits Florida regularly, for business and pleasure, and like Rob he has always hired a car when he is there. Years of experience across Florida's major car hire providers have given him a clear picture of what works well, what does not, and where a smarter approach was long overdue.
Rob
Rob has been travelling to Florida since the early 1990s, first as a parent bringing his young family to explore everything the Sunshine State had to offer, and later as a property owner in the Orlando area. Florida villa holidays were always the preference: the freedom of your own space, and a hire car waiting outside to go wherever the day took you.
That same frustration with unreliable online booking first for villas, later for car hire has shaped everything Rob has built. In 2006, he and Garry created Direct Villas Florida, a platform connecting UK holidaymakers directly with Florida villa owners and managers. That company, Direct Villas UK Ltd, is the business behind Smarter Car Hire Florida today.
Dan
Dan is the youngest member of the team and the technical force behind SmartTrack. With a deep IT background and an equally strong enthusiasm for Florida, he designed and built the SmartTrack system from scratch and integrated it seamlessly into the Smarter Car Hire Florida website.
Dan is also a regular Florida visitor. When it comes to hiring a car, he has one consistent requirement, the biggest one available.
Why We Built SmartTrack
Between the three of us, we have hired cars from most of Florida's major providers over many years and many trips. That experience taught us a great deal including one frustrating truth that every UK and European visitor eventually discovers.
Florida car hire prices move constantly. The major providers use dynamic pricing algorithms, which means the rate on your booking today may be higher or lower tomorrow, next week, or next month. The only way to benefit from a price drop was to keep checking refreshing the same search, over and over, hoping to land at exactly the right moment before rates moved again.
In reality, the chances of that were never good. Most people either missed the drop entirely, or gave up checking and paid more than they needed to.
We built SmartTrack to solve that problem. The system monitors the live price of your Florida car hire booking automatically, and when a lower price becomes available, SmartTrack rebooks it at the lower rate without changing any of your original booking criteria. The system then emails you to confirm exactly what you have saved. You do not need to check anything. You simply wait for the good news to arrive.
Always Here When You Need Us
We also know from personal experience that car hire does not always go smoothly particularly at the counter.
Rob experienced this during a family holiday in Florida. On arrival at the rental desk, he was told the vehicle he had booked was unavailable. The replacement offered was not suitable not enough space for his family. He accepted it on the understanding that something better would be arranged the next day, then contacted the company he had originally booked through for help.
That company only operated by email. The response was slow. The issue took days to resolve, days that should have been spent enjoying the holiday.
That experience is the reason we provide a 24/7 UK telephone support line, staffed and operated in the UK. If you are standing at the rental counter in Florida and something is not right whether that is a vehicle dispute, an insurance question, or simply something you are not sure about you can call us on 01325 808123 (option 1).
Our Company
Smarter Car Hire Florida is owned and operated under Direct Villas UK Ltd, UK Company Number 06009413 — the same company behind Direct Villas Florida, which has been connecting UK holidaymakers with Florida villa owners since 2006. We are a UK-registered business, and we operate with full transparency.
