Car hire lost our trust. We are building it back.

Selo started the way most honest companies do: with one traveller getting burned once too often. That traveller is me. I’m Oisín, I travel every chance I get, for the love of it and for work, and hiring a car is usually the moment a trip becomes properly yours. Which is why it stung to keep getting burned: prices that grew at the desk, insurance I never asked for after a delayed flight, deposits that took weeks to come back, and more than once a damage claim at the hand-back for a mark nobody had recorded at pickup, with no way for either side to prove a thing.

Eventually renting a car stopped feeling worth it, and millions of travellers make that same quiet calculation every year, while thousands of honest local rental businesses lose those customers to the reputation of their worst competitors.

I have spent my working life in why-don’t-we-fix-it mode: health technology first, a creative agency now. Selo is the same reflex pointed at car hire: the version of renting a car I kept wishing existed while standing at the desk, where nobody has to take anyone’s word for anything. That is the whole company.

For now it is just my first name here. Selo should be judged by its mechanism, not my CV. And if you have your own deposit story, I want to hear it: hello@selohire.com. I read everything.