there is thing of supply and demand, marketing, surveys and etc, all the planning goes in the first stage of a business not after the doors open, plus if they need more cars, they just calll, that;s all and most cars are supplied with the stipulation if need then you pay the agency for usage, parent company like ford gm, toyotoHow do rental car agencies have the right number of cars at each location?
They don't always have the right number of cars... Some get wrecked, some get stolen, some break down. I was in the business for 10 years as an Operations Manager and Fleet Manager so I have some experience in this.
We do ALOT of fleet planning to determine what our projected utilization will be. Once we determine what fleet size we feel we need we place our orders for the year; different delivery cycles so that new cars come in through out the year.
Once we know the number of vehicles we open up the reservations system for bookings. We can manipulate the system to book more or less based on pricing; if we are booked up then we will black out a specific car class or entire date ranges. Keep in mind that at an airport location we will always expect a 15%-35% no show rate depending on the location.
If there is another branch in the area we can always grab extra cars from them if they are available. Moving the vehicles becomes the hurdle at that point.
What screws us up most the time is the actual renter. Lets say you booked M-F with a 9am drop off time on Friday. I will open that vehicle for booking on Friday. If you do not return the vehicle until 5pm on Friday night there is a good chance someone did not get their vehicle or we were forced to give a substitute vehicle (upgrade) at no additional cost. This is why the industry charges late hours and additional days when your 3 hours late.
Hope this helps.
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