Travel buyers are finding more uses for the car-sharing
model as it spreads across the United States, particularly as major car rental
suppliers increase their investments into the programs.
Long popular in Europe, car sharing—membership-based
organizations in which users can access vehicles all hours of the day via the
Internet and wireless technology—first came to the United States more than a
decade ago through suppliers Zipcar and Flexcar. Zipcar, which merged with
Flexcar in 2007, remains the biggest supplier in the United States with a fleet
of more than 7,000 vehicles, but more recently legacy suppliers Hertz and
Enterprise, as well as U-Haul, have introduced their own car-sharing programs
in select geographies.
The models differ slightly, with U-Haul's U Car Share and
Enterprise's WeCar targeting corporate, university and government accounts,
while Hertz's Connect by Hertz follows a model similar to Zipcar, targeting
more leisure usage, said Julian Espiritu, a former Zipcar executive who now
manages Abrams CarSharing Advisors, a service launched by Abrams Consulting
Group last year. All, however, do some corporate business, he said.
"We do have corporate customers who use it," said
Robert Stuart, senior vice president of sales for Hertz. "A lot of
corporations are encouraging carpooling, so those employees can use it if they
need to travel while at work."
Other companies in urban areas use car-sharing services for
short trips to meetings, Espiritu said. This saves money over standard car
rental, because travelers pay hourly rather than daily rates, as car sharing
includes fuel costs and provides parking, he said. Seattle's Swedish Medical
Center, for example, lets its employees use Zipcar for business travel, which
frees them from dealing with mileage reimbursements.
Aside from the actual vehicles, car-sharing vendors also now
supply their car-sharing technology to help corporations and governments manage
their own fleets. Using the technology, corporations can set up automated
reservations for their fleet and monitor where their vehicles are at all times.
"A lot of these corporate organizations have huge
fleet-management needs," Abrams Consulting's Espiritu said. "This
cuts down the cost of labor and lets them reduce their fleet expenses."
City officials in Washington, D.C., for example, recently
equipped their fleet with Zipcar technology and as a result were able to reduce
the fleet size by about 85 percent, he said.
Hertz acquired its car-sharing technology supplier, Eileo,
last year and is about to begin a pilot program to manage the fleet of the city
of Philadelphia, according to Stuart.
Espiritu expects corporate usage of car-sharing programs to
increase with wider distributed. For now, they are not usable by travelers
whose itineraries include air travel, but he said that eventually will change.
"Soon, we will see car-share operators at the airport,"
Espiritu said. "This is the future of car rental."
This story originally
appeared in the August 9, 2010, edition of Business Travel News.