ON THE ROAD
Despite dramatic improvements in rail services, heightened awareness of environmental issues and a significant rise in air bookings, growth in the car rental sector continues to accelerate
WAY BACK IN 1807, A FRENCH CHAP CALLED NICÉPHORE NIÉPCE – widely credited as the inventor of photography – and his older brother Claude introduced the world to the Pyréolophore, reck- oned to be the first-ever internal combustion engine. Their contraption had a major draw-
back, insofar as it was fuelled by a complex mixture involving pulverised dried lycopo- dium moss. Unfortunately, lycopodium moss grows mainly in the tropics, and was thus not widely available in 19th-century France. However, the invention did work after a
fashion, in that it propelled things forwards. All the Niépce boys had to do was mount it on a wheeled chassis, and automobilisme would have been born, and – 80-odd years later – engineers Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler would have had nothing to do. Instead, the brothers went and attached it to a boat. Fast-forward to September 1908, when Henry Ford’s first “car for the great multitude” rolled off the production line. Although Ford promised that the Model T would be “so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one”, it still cost US$260 at a time when the average rate of pay was 22 cents an hour. Fast-forward another ten years, when 22-year-old Walter Jacobs recognised that
88 BBT MARCH/APRIL 2016
plenty of men were actually not “making a good salary”. He duly set up what is believed to be the first car rental business. Five years later, the company was pulling
in revenues of around US$1 million, and in 1923, Jacobs sold his brainchild to the president of Yellow Truck and Coach Manufacturing Company. His name was John Hertz… Today, Hertz Corporation – which includes the Dollar, Thrifty and Firefly brands – has a fleet of around 490,000 in North America and over 170,000 cars internationally.
Colossal though those numbers might
be, they are nothing compared to those at Enterprise Holdings – which includes the Alamo and National brands as well as Enterprise Rent-A-Car and Enterprise Fleet Management – which boasts a total fleet of 1.7 million cars. Avis Budget has a fleet of around 300,000. The other major players, Europcar and Sixt among them, take the total to well over three million. The odd thing is that the demand exists to sustain such vast numbers.
COMPETITION FROM RAIL One could be forgiven for thinking that dramatic improvements in UK and European rail services and a far more business-friendly approach from train op- erating companies, coupled with greater
Rental companies and the cars they offer are becoming greener
corporate awareness of environmental issues, would have sounded alarm bells (if not a death-knell) within the rental sector. But this is not the case. Throughout the post-recession era, the Guild of Travel Management Companies’ (GTMC) quar- terly transaction statistics have consistently shown substantial growth in rental car reservations – with percentage increases
BUYINGBUSINESSTRAVEL.COM
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