Meeting the model requirements

Meeting the model requirements

Companies strive to meet customer specifications in face of fleet management problems

Setting standards: when booking, customers can ask for a specific model, such as a MercedesE-class, but the car rental company can not always guarantee a particular vehicle

IT IS a well-known fact that when you rent a car, you cannot specify what make of car you would like. What most people do not know is why.

It all comes down to fleet management.

Incredible though it might sound, rental companies do not know week by week, sometimes even day by day, exactly which cars they have where.

They only know that, for instance, seven group A cars and three group B vehicles will be at location X.

If everything has gone according to plan, these should match the bookings for that location.

It is all a bit haphazard, but most rental companies have thousands of cars moving around the country each day. National has 30,000 in the UK, while Avis has around 12,000 and Europcar has 18,000. That is an awful lot of engines to keep track of.

National fleet director Stephen Deakin said: “We will only guarantee a particular group but even then it does go wrong, in which case we will give clients a free upgrade – and that is never refused.

“Our problem is that we deal a lot with corporate clients and it is not unusual for them to phone and say they are keeping the car for an extra day.

“Also, people get stuck in traffic, so cars are not returned when they should be. And there are a lot of one-way rentals. The locations just do not know when a vehicle is coming back.”

Budget International vice-president sales and marketing Roeland Moens said renters can note a preference for a particular type of car at the time of booking, but the company cannot guarantee a particular model of car.

Like National, it will upgrade customers if the group of car that has been booked is unavailable.

Europcar said it will try to supply a specific make and model if it has at least 72 hours’ notice, but will not make guarantees.

Europcar UK marketing director Kirsten Roennau said: “We deliberately include three to four models in each vehicle category so we can always deliver the required standard and size of vehicle to our customers.”

National and Budget agree that most renters do not care what kind of car they get as long as it matches the required specification.

But Moens added: “We do have customers who say they do not want certain makes of car, for instance French, Japanese or Korean.

“They have a preconceived idea about it and then it is up to the location manager to decide what to do. If the customer really doesn’t want the car, he or she will be dissatisfied, no matter how good the vehicle is, but sometimes preconceptions are changed.

“I have never known a customer to go away without a car rather than have one they don’t want.”

Deakin said most people only want their car to be shiny – all cars on the fleet have metallic paint – clean and smart. But he added that domestic tiffs are not unusual at National’s Heathrow office where the company operates a system called Choice.

This allows renters to pick the specific car they want to hire from a row of, say, group C vehicles. “The wife picks a car by the colour, while the husband wants to test drive a new model,” said Deakin.