Why we built HeyMoto — and why the hospitality industry is the place this finally works.
By Joe Furnari — Founder & President, HeyMoto
Every host in this industry has had the same conversation.
Guest lands. Guest texts. "Hey — what's the best way to get around?"
And the host does what hosts have always done. Sends a list. Recommends an Uber. Maybe forwards a number for a rental counter twenty miles from the property. The guest figures it out — eventually, usually grumpily, and almost always at full retail markup that the host never sees a dollar of.
The car was always part of the stay. The host just never got to participate in it.
That's the gap HeyMoto was built to close. And the reason it works now — when it hasn't worked before — comes down to two things that finally lined up.
Look at the volume index. Commercial and corporate fleet sales are up roughly 55% since 2021. Personal retail car purchases are down over the same window. The line is not a wiggle. It's a structural divergence — and it's been widening every year since the affordability crisis hit in 2022.
People still need cars. They just don't want to own one sitting in a driveway 95% of the time, depreciating, insured, registered, and unused.
What they want is access — at the moment they need it, for as long as they need it, with someone else handling everything else.
That's what a stay at a villa, a hotel, or a short-term rental already is. Access to a place, for a window of time, with someone else handling everything else.
The car is the next obvious thing on the list. We're just the first ones who built the infrastructure to actually deliver it.
This is the part most people miss.
For thirty years, the reason hosts couldn't offer cars to guests had nothing to do with the cars. It was the insurance. A personal auto policy doesn't cover a renter. A commercial policy is built for an annual term, an annual premium, and a vehicle that's always in use. Nobody wrote coverage that turned on the second a guest got in the car and turned off the second they got out.
So hosts didn't offer cars. They couldn't. The math didn't work and the carrier didn't exist.
What changed is that the carrier now exists — because we built it.
HeyMoto runs on insurance infrastructure from Signal Street and TeqMobility, purpose-built for exactly this use case: coverage that activates at the moment of transaction and deactivates the moment the vehicle is returned. On-rent and off-rent, segmented and priced per exposure, with the host named as additional insured and Signal Street carrying the underwriting authority.
Forty-two years in this market went into building that. The architect of the original peer-to-peer rental insurance category — Dave Haley, the same person who wrote the original policy forms for the livery and for-hire space — built the program that sits underneath HeyMoto.
That's the part you can't replicate by raising venture money and building an app. The app is the easy part. The carrier program underneath it took four decades.
A villa manager in Joshua Tree adds her Bronco to her listing. A guest books the property, and during checkout, he gets a one-tap option to add the car for the length of the stay. Three clicks. Insurance, driver verification, payment — all handled. Keys in a lockbox.
That's it. That's the product.
The host keeps up to 95% of the rental. Payment hits her account every Friday. The guest gets a car that was waiting for them when they landed. And the property she's already managing now generates an additional $250 to $750 per stay without her doing a single extra thing during the visit.
For a hotel, it's the same mechanism at a different scale — vehicles offered as an amenity at check-in, coverage running through the same API, settlement running through the same Stripe rails.
For a vacation rental property manager with twenty units, it's twenty times that.
The car was always supposed to be part of the stay. We just made it possible to actually deliver it.
There's going to be a lot more written here. How the insurance works. How dealerships and repair shops fit in. What we're seeing in early markets. Why we think the next ten years of automotive look nothing like the last fifty.
But this one had to be first — because if you don't understand the why, the rest of it just sounds like another app.
It's not.
It's the answer to a question every host in the hospitality industry has been quietly asking for years.
Where do I tell my guest to get a car?
You don't tell them anymore. You hand them one.
Welcome to HeyMoto.
Joe Furnari is the Founder & President of HeyMoto. He can be reached at joe@heymoto.com.
HeyMoto is powered by insurance infrastructure from Signal Street Insurance Services and TeqMobility — purpose-built for the shared-mobility economy.