The winner of the AfMA 2017 Fleet Safety Award is Tourism Holdings Australia Pty Ltd (thl).
The company holds the title as the largest campervan and motorhome rental fleet globally. In Australia alone the business serviced over 50,000 customers over 28,000 vehicles within 2014, across a total fleet size of over 1,400 vehicles.
While Tourism Holdings Australalia was thriving from a financial and operational perspective, the company had an opportunity to improve insurance, repair and maintenance costs and were always on the look out to improve safety. The introduction of telematics seemed to be a possible solution to both.
“In late 2014, we started installing telematics devices and TomTom screens to all vehicles in order to have better communication with our customers, reduce the number of accidents, and reduce repair and maintenance costs through influencing their driver behaviour.,” says Nicky Bree, Tourism Holdings Australia Commercial Fleet Manager.
“We also wanted to increase the customer experience and provide our customers with more information while on-road.”
The use of TomTom screens has seen automated messages created to encourage drivers to not drive over the speed limits, to warn of severe weather conditions such as cyclones or bushfires and to promote safety through the creation of an in-house Safe Driving video.
Through these initiatives the Tourism Holdings Australia team have significantly reduced the number of minor and severe accidents in its fleet. In the last twelve months alone the company has to date recorded only two left road/roller over incidents, down from 14 in 2016 while the rate of speeding has dropped by 84%.
“Although we started our telematics journey in late 2014, we really haven’t seen the results until late 2016,” Nicky said.
Grant Webster CEO Tourism Holdings Australia said, “thl Australia has been the test environment for the telematics programme, and we aim to implement safety alert systems that will contribute to safer driving in all our vehicles across our operations in New Zealand, North America and the UK by 2020.”
“This will increase telematics from 1,400+ vehicles to over 4,000 vehicles – an exciting opportunity ahead!”
AfMA would like to acknowledge its official sponsor of the 2017 Fleet Safety Award, ANCAP Safety.
