National Car Rental and sister brand Enterprise emerged as clear favorites among corporate travel buyers in BTN’s inaugural Car Rental Brand and Ground Transportation Survey, an achievement qualified by the fact that buyers gave the car rental
industry high marks in general.
On a scale of 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent), the 158 buyers who responded ranked National 4.31, Enterprise 4.29, Avis 3.88 and Hertz 3.75. Click
here for more travel buyer feedback.
More than a third said car rental service has improved over the past 12 months, and more than 60 percent said service levels have remained steady over the past year. That leaves only 4.4 percent who said car rental service had gotten worse.
Among the major corporate car rental brands, National earned the highest average score based on buyers’ evaluation of seven criteria relevant to their preferred suppliers. Enterprise trailed National by a mere few hundredths of a point on a five-point
scale, and the two brands took turns in the top spot for each of seven criteria rated by travel managers.
Greg Stubblefield, chief strategy officer for both brands’ parent company, Enterprise Holdings, recently told BTN that the company has invested “an enormous sum of money” to build up National’s place in the industry, which bears out in the survey results. While some in the industry had feared that Enterprise’s
acquisition of National in 2007 would dilute the brand, bringing down its pricing and position from a premium, corporate-focused brand, the opposite has occurred, said car rental industry analyst Neil Abrams, president of Abrams Consulting Group. “National had been the perennial underdog, but in recent
years, it’s been upping its game. It’s aggressively pricing, closing the gap to its competition, and it’s making noise by improving its service.”
The other two major corporate brands, Avis Car Rental and Hertz, trailed Enterprise and National by nearly half a point, but their scores were generally high in most criteria. Car rental company satisfaction levels vary wildly across surveys, Abrams noted,
but no brand currently is a true laggard. “The three major brands servicing the corporate community are all doing a good job, though it’s getting harder and harder to create differentiators,” he said. “You’re only as good as your last rental.”
One National differentiator is its Emerald Aisle program, which allows customers to bypass the counter and select their own vehicle, Abrams said. One buyer singled out National as having “sped up the check-in process considerably and not haggling our clients to buy things.”
Similarly, Avis has focused on speeding up the process on both ends, said Avis Budget Group senior vice president of sales Beth Kinerk. That includes its self-select Select & Go service at 50 airport locations in North America, e-receipts and a direct
interface with Concur that pre-populates most fields for expense reporting, she said.
Car rental pricing across the industry has remained fairly stable over the past few years, particularly for large corporate clients. Flexibility in transient pricing and in services and amenities, though, proved one of the largest differentiators in
the survey. Enterprise vice president Brad Carr said the sales team has focused on that area. “We’re in business to make a profit, so we have to expect a reasonable return, but there have been a lot of opportunities to create malleable solutions a customer would appreciate rather than just saying, ‘This
is our pricing across the board,’ ” he said. “They may have demands in a certain market, and that gives us additional flexibility somewhere else.”
One survey respondent praised National for providing an appropriately priced rebid when the buyer’s company needed to add insurance to its car rental agreement. “They are truly a partner that looks out for our best interest and takes the time to educate us on where the buying patterns of our drivers can be changed to
decrease costs, such as working with us to move our long-term rentals to an off-airport location to avoid the additional on-airport rental fees,” the buyer said. “They are very proactive.”
Another buyer said Hertz offered the “flexibility to maneuver rates when market conditions changed the parameters of our contract” and added additional discount pricing to drive down costs.
Hertz also has enhanced its ancillary offerings, executive vice president of global sales and marketing Bob Stuart said. For example, it has added a feature to its NeverLost navigation system that allows travelers to pre-load trip plans—meetings and
dinners, for instance—so they don’t have to enter addresses manually in the car.
National and Enterprise scored well above the other brands for both account managers and client communications. One buyer noted that the National account manager had contacted travelers personally in response to a complaint. Another said an individual who had handled accounts for both Enterprise and National offered
“amazingly quick” turnaround for any questions or requests. Another buyer cited the quick response rate of Avis, which recorded some of its highest scores in communication and complaint resolution.
Kinerk attributed those positive scores to feedback systems. “[Online] customer satisfaction surveys are sent out via email within 15 minutes of the check-in. Customer surveys are aggregated and delivered to field location managers in real time to enable immediate response to customer suggestions.”
Enterprise scored highest for overall price value, followed closely by National. Each brand’s clients valued price and value about the same, while Avis and Hertz corporate clients put a premium on service over price.
National, Enterprise, Avis and Hertz all scored high for car servicing. Hertz has brought in 350,000 new cars to replace older ones, Stuart said. “It was a big undertaking, but we needed to do it. Our age of the fleet is down where it used to be historically.” National, meanwhile, benefits from access to Enterprise’s
enormous fleet, Carr said. “Where our competitors might have a blackout period, we can move cars around to meet demand,” he said.
Data reporting popped up most frequently as an area where car rental companies need to improve. Even so, buyers gave high marks to car rental companies for reporting; 85 percent of respondents received timely and accurate reports. Both Enterprise and National topped 90 percent in satisfaction with reporting.
One buyer said National provided “flexible, detailed activity reporting, which allows us to target communications to our travelers.” That buyer could identify travelers who opted for additional insurance, pre-paid fuel or GPS, which the buyer’s company provides on its own.
Hertz and Avis recorded slightly lower data-reporting satisfaction levels but still passed muster with 74 percent and 81 percent of buyers, respectively. Stuart said the company has made a recent sales push to craft better reporting. Rather than showing that 70 percent of an organization’s travelers are registered with
Hertz’s Gold loyalty program, for example, the supplier could show that percentage among travelers who take at least two trips per year, a more meaningful benchmark. Hertz also helps buyers determine when renting makes better financial sense than using employees’ personal cars, an area Enterprise
also has addressed. “We try to be a consultant,” Stuart said. “That’s just being a partner with them, and I think they value that.”
Methodology
The inaugural BTNCar Rental Brand and Ground Transportation Survey measures corporate buyer perceptions and satisfaction levels with suppliers.
For the car rental portion, BTN asked respondents to grade only those car rental companies with which they had a negotiated contract or had booked a meaningful amount of business in the past year. Respondents ranked six brands in seven attributes on
a scale of one (poor) to five (excellent). BTN averaged scores in each category to create an overall score for each car rental company.
Not every respondent rated every car rental supplier in every category. Participants who offered no response for a particular category or brand were not included in that average rating. Brands that did not reach a minimum usage threshold were disqualified
from the survey.
For the chauffeured transportation portion, BTN asked respondents to rate the importance of seven attributes on a five-point scale and then asked each respondent to rank on a five-point scale his or her satisfaction with his or her primary ground
transportation supplier’s performance for each attribute. BTN did not perform a brand ranking on ground transportation suppliers, as the market is too fragmented to provide meaningful results.
From June to July 2015, BTN collected responses from travel manager and buyer members of the BTN Research Council and a randomly selected subset of qualified subscribers of Business Travel News and Travel Procurement. Of 158 respondents,
11 percent spent less than $1 million in 2014 U.S. Booked air volume, 48 percent spent $1 million to $12 million and 41 percent spent more than $12 million. Equation Research hosted the survey and tabulated the results.
This report originally appeared in the Sept. 14, 2015,
edition of Business Travel News.