In March, William Petz departed from his usual routine of logging on to Travelocity or Orbitz to rent a car from Budget or Hertz while traveling on business.
A Facebook posting had caught his eye: It was for a rental company called Silvercar, which offered a single kind of car — an Audi A4. It came with GPS, Wi-Fi and satellite radio at no additional cost. Mr. Petz was traveling to San Francisco from New York to open an office for his company, Quiet Events, which organizes dance parties where participants use headphones. The occasion, he said, called for him to make a strong first impression — so why not the Audi?
He made the reservation using his smartphone, picked up the car a little before midnight at the airport (there was no attendant) and was on his way.
Despite the attention being paid to Uber and Lyft, rental car companies are proliferating, seeking to serve a growing market of younger travelers and their ever-changing tastes, experts say.
“Vehicles are more free-floating, going where the customers are, rather than where the companies would like them to be,” says Neil Abrams, president of the Abrams Consulting Group in Purchase, N.Y.
A study released in July by the Global Business Travel Association found that rental cars were used by business travelers 36 percent of the time, more frequently than taxis (24 percent), limousines (13 percent) or transportation network companies like Uber (11 percent). The study did not separate traditional rental car companies like Hertz from car-sharing services like Zipcar or peer-to-peer services like RelayRides.
Traditional car rental companies — Enterprise, which includes Alamo and National; Hertz, which includes Dollar and Thrifty; and Avis, which includes Budget and Zipcar — account for about 95 percent of the rental market, according to the trade publication Auto Rental News. All this consolidation has in fact allowed services like Silvercar to thrive. Its vehicles are available at 10 airports and it has a temporary pop-up location in Brooklyn until Labor Day.
“They find a gap in the market that sees rental cars as a commodity,” said Rick Garlick, who heads the global travel and hospitality practice at J. D. Power.
Still, with Uber facing headwinds in some cities, and being viewed askance by some corporate travel departments, at least one expert says that car-sharing companies like Zipcar are poised for growth.
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