Inside the Fleet Alejandro Betancourt López Built From Idle Permits

Owning a pile of licences isn’t the same as running a transport company. To make the permits pay, Alejandro Betancourt López had to put real cars, drivers, and operations behind them, one city at a time.

Auro Travel started matching its permit portfolio with an actual fleet. Drivers were recruited and trained. Vehicles were sourced. Operations opened first in Madrid and Barcelona, then Valencia and Málaga.

One Permit, One Car

Auro built methodically because the rules left no choice. Each VTC licence covered a single vehicle. Scaling the fleet, then, meant a one-to-one match between permits and cars on the road. Grow the operation by a hundred cars, and a hundred more permits had to be in hand to match them.

That demanded constant coordination with regulators. Inspections, driver certifications, and municipal requirements all had to be handled at once, across several cities. The difficulty became its own moat; even a rich rival would’ve needed years to copy it. By full scale, Auro was running more than 3,500 drivers and holding upwards of 3,000 licences across Spain’s four largest metros.

The Arrow Twist

Auro then built a division called Arrow. It leased VTC permits to other transport firms that needed legal cover but had none of their own, which made Auro both an operator and a platform.

That gave it two ways to earn. Its own cars generated fares, while the permit stockpile threw off lease income through Arrow’s contracts. Whether Auro’s cars ran full or empty on a given day, the licences kept paying. The portfolio Alejandro Betancourt López had assembled stayed productive no matter which way passenger demand moved. Idle paper had been turned into a machine that earned around the clock.