Value Targets Mtgs. Market

Value Rent-A-Car, a leisure-oriented company, is pursuing corporate group business with a $500,000 campaign aimed at meeting planners. The program includes discounts, the development of marketing materials geared to planners and a telemarketing effort conducted in cooperation with convention and visitors bureaus in the major markets that Value serves.

The CVBs in such high-profile convention cities as Las Vegas, Denver, Orlando and Atlanta will generate leads to the car rental company, which has started a telesales department that will be responsible for following up on those leads.

The program, to be launched in March, won't exclude specialty car types, a restriction typically imposed in discount situations.

While some elements of the campaign, such as getting CVB leads and offering discounts, were previously in effect on a limited basis, this is the first time Value is pulling it all together.

"We are doing a very cohesive, focused effort toward meeting planners, instead of the ad hoc programs we have previously used," said Anthony D'Alto, executive vice president and chief operating officer at Value. "This is the first campaign for meeting planners that is coming out of the corporate office, instead of our regional offices."

Initially, the company will target its existing client base and planner lists from the major associations.

Lou Schwartz, who was previously with National Car Rental's corporate department, is heading up the 12-person telesales department, which will target travel agents as well as meeting planners.

With 50 locations in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Florida, Georgia and Louisiana, Value put itself on the map almost two years ago by introducing a much-heralded hourly rental program.

The Boca Raton, Fla.-based company, which has doubled its revenues in the past four years, already dominates Florida's low-budget rental market. D'Alto hopes that the new approach will attract corporate loyalty as well--perhaps partly in the form of crossover business from the leisure market--and widen Value's appeal outside the region.

"We are 90 to 95 percent leisure right now, but we're evolving into a full-service company that will be going after a lot of different markets," D'Alto said.

He noted that giant competitors like National and Hertz cannot afford to provide the hourly rates that Value offers. A typical corporate rental involves keeping the automobile for two days at an average cost of $50. In contrast, Value's average corporate customer will keep a car for 12 to 14 hours and will pay about $29.

"We can't compete with mega car companies with respect to their platinum and gold card programs," D'Alto noted. "If a client is really interested in running through an airport and renting a car in 30 seconds, we're probably not the car company for them. If you're looking to pay for exactly what you use and pay lower rates in the first place, than we just may be your agency. We think our approach can offer planners and smaller, budget-conscious companies a real alternative."

In a rental environment dominated by large companies reverberating from the shock of leveraged buyouts, rapidly shifting allegiances and owners that seek to enhance profits by trimming operating costs to the bone, Value (and owner Mitsubishi Motor Sales of America) hopes to boost market share by reverting its attention to value for the customer and a service-oriented approach toward car rental.

The new approach, D'Alto said, has resulted from a radical restructuring of the firm's employee training and revenue growth strategies over the past two years.

An interactive CD-ROM training program for customer service employees, aimed at the Generation Xers who often are the ones behind the rental counter, takes four days to complete instead of the two weeks in the classroom that it replaced. It gives examples of customer-employee interaction and allows the employee to respond to the "virtual customer."

Not only has the product won some awards for efficient training and cut training bills for the company in half, it has resulted in a more uniform training process that keeps pace with a high-turnover population. "This program logs employees' progress and comes up with a profile of the successful customer service employee," D'Alto said.

The company also has invested more than $6 million in its networks and rental systems (with technology partner IBM) and has renovated its major locations. In addition, within the next year, Value will roll out reconfigured rental lobbies that "steer the consumer through the car rental process," D'Alto said.

The firm also is looking at expansion in Reno, Albuquerque, Salt Lake City, Colorado Springs and the Carolinas.