Avis Europe plans to introduce a charge for customers who fail to cancel their booking before scheduled collection time. The charge of €40 (or £40 or 60 Swiss francs) is initially being introduced for no-shows by individual customers, but will be applied to corporate clients later in the year. Customers who collect their car no later than 24 hours after the scheduled pick-up time will escape the charge.
In a prepared press statement, Avis said it is the first car rental company to adopt what it called a "standard travel industry procedure." In 2006, Hertz UK wrote to customers to tell them it was going to introduce a similar measure, but Hertz Europe
intervened to retract the announcement after
BTN broke the story.
Avis appears to be making the move because the cost of no-shows has been increasing. Smaller fleets and tighter utilization, combined with a higher proportion of prepaid bookings, mean that rental companies have fewer unused vehicles on their premises. It is not uncommon, therefore, for a location to block out a vehicle that ends up unused when it could have been allocated to another customer. In addition, the rental company incurs costs in preparing the paperwork for the rental and possibly driving it over from another location.
"Charges for canceling a rental booking are 100 percent avoidable if customers think ahead, and that's something we believe this measure will encourage them to do," said Avis Europe group commercial director Wolfgang Neumann in the prepared statement.