Switching From 1Now to Rentovation: The Migration Guide

Quick answer: Switching from 1Now to Rentovation is a five-step move: (1) export your vehicles, customers, and bookings from 1Now as CSV files; (2) run Rentovation’s migration importer, which auto-detects 1Now export columns and brings vehicles, photos, customers, and bookings over in one sequenced pass; (3) connect your own Stripe or Square account so payouts settle directly to you; (4) review your imported fleet and publish your branded storefront; and (5) run both systems in parallel until existing bookings complete, then cut over. The hands-on work is typically one sitting for a small fleet; the parallel run just waits out your booking horizon. Reviews, saved cards, and pricing rules do not migrate, so screenshot those before you export. Before you commit, read the honest comparison, including the two cases where 1Now is the better fit: you need Turo calendar sync, or you run under roughly 15 vehicles.

This is a working migration guide, not a sales page. It walks the actual sequence for moving a rental operation from 1Now to Rentovation, flags the two places operators lose data or bookings during a software switch, and is honest about the tradeoffs: 1Now has real strengths, and for some fleets it remains the better choice. If you want the full feature-by-feature and price-by-price breakdown first, start with Rentovation vs 1Now vs Fleetwire and come back here when you have decided to move.

Should you switch from 1Now at all?

Reasons operators switch to Rentovation: a flat $197/month price with no vehicle cap (1Now’s published tiers cap at 10 and 25 cars before custom Enterprise pricing), a storefront and customer list you own outright, and built-in renter verification, e-sign agreements, and deposit holds on every booking (1now.ai/pricing, accessed August 14, 2026).

Reasons to stay on 1Now: if you run a hybrid operation and need Turo calendar sync, 1Now lists it and Rentovation deliberately does not build it; our product exists to move bookings off the marketplace, not to mirror it. And on published prices, 1Now’s $150/month Essential tier is cheaper than Rentovation below roughly 15 vehicles. If either of those is decisive for you, staying put is the right call and this guide ends here.

1Now figures: 1now.ai/pricing, accessed August 14, 2026. Rentovation figures come from our own live plan configuration. Verify current pricing on both sites before deciding.

What should you check before you start?

Two hours of pre-flight saves the two failure modes that actually hurt during a migration. Work through this before you export anything.

• Know your booking horizon. Find the furthest-out reservation on your 1Now calendar. That date is when the old subscription can finally be cancelled, and knowing it up front stops the parallel run from feeling open-ended.
• Check who owns your domain. If your booking page runs on a subdomain your old vendor controls rather than a domain in your own registrar account, you cannot repoint it, and your migration plan needs a new URL and a redirect strategy instead. This is the single most common surprise.
• Count your vehicles and your customers. Write both numbers down before the export. They are what you check the import receipt against, and an import that lands 38 of 41 vehicles is much easier to spot when you knew it was 41.
• Confirm your payment processor situation. If you already run your own Stripe or Square account, this is a reconnect. If your old setup routed money through the vendor, you are creating a processor account for the first time and that has its own verification timeline. Start it early.
• Decide what happens to in-flight bookings. Either they finish on 1Now or you import them and manage everything in one place. Both work. Choosing on the day is what causes double-bookings.

What does not come across, and what do you do about it?

Being straight about this is more useful than a migration promise. A CSV carries data, not a whole software installation, and some things have to be rebuilt by hand.

Based on what the migration importer handles today (vehicles, customers, bookings, and photo URLs from CSV) and on what no CSV export can carry. Screenshot anything in the right-hand column before you cancel access to the old system.

Step 1: What do you need to export from 1Now?

Before touching anything else, get your data out and into files you control. You want three exports, each as a CSV or spreadsheet:

1. Vehicles (fleet export). The 1Now fleet export carries your vehicle names, specs, rates, and photo URLs in trailing image columns. This is the one file the importer is specifically tuned for: it recognizes 1Now’s vehicle-export column vocabulary on sight.
2. Customers. Names, emails, and phone numbers. This list is the asset you have been building; do not leave it behind.
3. Bookings. At minimum your current and future reservations, so the new calendar starts true. Past bookings are optional but useful for history.

If you cannot find an export button for one of these, ask 1Now support for a data export; reputable platforms provide one. Whatever you receive, keep the raw files. The importer maps columns visually, so an oddly shaped spreadsheet is a two-minute mapping job, not a blocker.

Step 2: How does the migration importer work?

Rentovation’s migration wizard takes any subset of the three files and runs the import in a deliberate sequence: vehicles first, then customers, then bookings, then photos, so your calendar-critical data lands before slow image fetches, and a photo hiccup can never hold your reservations hostage.

• Column mapping is automatic. The importer auto-detects common headers (including 1Now’s export vocabulary) and shows you the mapping to confirm or adjust before anything is written.
• Photos come along. Image URLs in the export’s trailing columns are fetched and attached to each vehicle automatically.
• You get a receipt. The wizard ends with a verification report of exactly what was imported, so you check the result against your source files instead of trusting a spinner.

Review the imported fleet the same day while the source files are fresh in your head. Confirm vehicle count, spot-check rates, and open two or three vehicles to verify photos.

Step 3: How do payouts reach your own account?

Rentovation connects your own Stripe or Square account, so booking revenue settles directly to you, under your name, from day one. If you already ran your own processor with 1Now, this is a reconnect. If not, creating a Stripe or Square account takes minutes, and it is worth doing before the storefront goes live so your first direct booking pays out cleanly.

Budget for the processor’s own rate separately from any software fee. Card processing is a cost your payment provider charges you directly, it is not something Rentovation marks up, and the current rates are published on Stripe’s pricing page (accessed August 13, 2026). We do not quote a percentage here because the published rate varies by country and changes; read it at the source on the day you switch.

Step 4: What replaces your 1Now-hosted booking page?

Your branded booking site is what replaces the 1Now-hosted page. Set your logo and colors, confirm rates and availability came through, and publish. If you own a custom domain, point it at the new storefront; renters bookmarked on your old URL should land on the new one, not a dead page. Then take one test booking end to end yourself: reserve, sign, pay, and refund it. Ten minutes of pretend-renter now catches what no checklist can.

Step 5: How do you cut over without losing a booking?

The safe pattern is a parallel run, and it is simpler than it sounds:

1. Freeze new bookings on the old system once the new storefront is live. Existing reservations keep their dates on 1Now.
2. Serve out the old calendar. Bookings made before the switch complete where they were made, unless you imported them and prefer to manage everything in one place.
3. Point everything at the new storefront: your website links, social profiles, Google listing if you have one, and your email signature.
4. Tell your repeat renters. One short email with the new booking link. Your customer list came over in step 2; this is why.
5. Cancel the old subscription when its calendar is empty. Not before.

The two classic migration mistakes are cancelling the old system while it still holds future bookings, and switching the domain before the new site has taken a real test booking. The parallel run makes both impossible.

What does the first week after cutover look like?

The migration is not finished when the data lands. It is finished when a renter you did not tell about the switch books through the new site without noticing anything happened. The week between those two moments has a short list of its own.

1. Day one: take a real booking yourself. Not a test record in an admin screen. Reserve as a renter, sign the agreement, pay, then refund it. This catches email deliverability, agreement formatting, and deposit-hold behaviour in one pass, and those are the three things that break quietly.
2. Day one: check the confirmation emails actually arrive. Send one to an address on a different provider from your own. A booking flow that works and a confirmation that lands in spam look identical from the admin side.
3. Day two: re-enter your pricing rules. Seasonal rates, weekend pricing, minimum trip lengths, and any per-vehicle overrides, checked against the screenshots you took before the export.
4. Day three: update every external pointer. Google Business Profile, social bios, your email signature, any printed material with the old URL, and any paid ads still sending traffic to the old page. Stale links are how a smooth migration still loses bookings.
5. End of week one: email your repeat renters. One short message with the new booking link and nothing else. This is the payoff for exporting the customer list in step one, and it is the moment the switch stops being a risk and becomes an asset.
6. Ongoing: watch the old calendar drain. When the last pre-switch booking completes, cancel the old subscription and archive the export files somewhere you will still be able to find them in a year.

Keep the raw CSV exports permanently, not just until the import looks right. They are the only copy of your history that does not live inside somebody else’s product, and they cost nothing to keep.

What do you tell your renters?

This is the part of a migration operators worry about most and prepare for least. The good news is that renters do not care what software you run; they care that booking still works and that their next reservation is safe. Say those two things and nothing else.

A message that works has four parts and fits in a short paragraph: the new booking link, a sentence confirming that existing reservations are unaffected, what if anything they need to do (usually nothing, except re-entering a card on their next booking, since saved payment methods do not migrate), and a direct reply-to address for anyone with a question. No apology, no explanation of your vendor decision, no changelog. A migration announcement that reads like an incident report creates worry that did not exist.

Timing matters more than wording. Send it after the new storefront has taken your own test booking, not before, so the link in the email is known to work. Send it to the customer list you exported in step one, which is the concrete payoff for treating that export as the important file rather than an afterthought. And send it once: a follow-up reminder to people who already rebooked is how a helpful email becomes spam.

What if the import gets something wrong?

Occasionally it will, usually because a source export had an unusual column layout or a photo URL that no longer resolves. None of it is unrecoverable, and knowing that in advance stops a small problem from turning into an abandoned migration.

• Wrong or missing rates. Fix them on the vehicle directly. Rates are a handful of fields and re-entering them is faster than re-running an import.
• Vehicles missing entirely. Check the source CSV for blank required cells in those rows, correct the file, and re-run the import for just that file. The importer shows you the mapping before it writes, so a bad map is catchable on the second pass.
• Photos did not come through. The image URLs in the export may have expired. Upload the originals directly; if the only copies live in the old system, retrieve them before you cancel that subscription, which is another argument for the parallel run.
• Duplicate customers. Usually the same person under two email addresses in the source data. Merge or delete the duplicate rather than leaving both, because a split history undermines the customer list you migrated to keep.
• A booking landed on the wrong dates. Fix it immediately and check the rest against your source file. A date-format mismatch tends to affect a whole file rather than one row, so if you find one, look for the pattern.

The reason this is survivable at all is the sequencing: because you still hold the raw exports and the old system is still running, every one of these is a correction rather than a data loss.

Bring your fleet over in one sitting

Start a 14-day free trial, run the migration importer with your 1Now exports, and see your own storefront with your own fleet on it before you decide anything. Your cars, your customers, your payments, owned by you.

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Not ready? See how onboarding works step by step, or run your numbers in the fees calculator first.

Scope and limitations

Disclosure, scope, and limits. We build the migration importer this guide describes, and we name the two cases where staying on 1Now is the better answer rather than burying them. This guide is informational and reflects publicly available information as of August 14, 2026. It is not legal, tax, or insurance advice. Rentovation is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by 1Now; the name is used for factual comparison.