I'm creating a mobile application for a company that provides the software for car rental companies. The app will enable a user to book a car rental.
This is where it gets tricky...
There needs to be only ONE application for the software company to distribute to its clients (the car rental companies). The software company has 50+ clients, creating an app for each would be tiresome.
Although there will only be ONE app, the user will have to associate the app with the car company that marketed the app to them.
Initially, I thought we could simply use GPS to associate a user to a company, but some of these companies are in close vicinity of each other. We cannot present a pre-populated list of companies to the user because this would defeat the "branding" purpose of the app. This app is not meant to broker car rentals, but rather be used as a booking/branding tool for the individual companies.
So far we have come up with two solutions, but we are certainly open to a better one...
Upon initial launch of the app, the car rental companies' customers are given an installation key which is inputted by the user. It will associate the app to a specific company.
Upon initial launch of the app, the user is asked to input the name of the car rental company they would like to use the app for. They cannot choose from a list, but we can possibly incorporate smart suggestions as they input the name.
I don't think either of these options presents an ideal user experience. Any suggestions/feedback are greatly appreciated.