This is part of Airplane Mode, a series on the business—and pleasure—of travel right now.
My flight from New York to Austin landed right on time, at 3 p.m., preserving the rest of my glorious Friday afternoon. With my bags in hand, the only thing left to do was pick up my rental car. Once I had those keys in hand, two days of indulgent weekend barbecue in apocalyptic dew points awaited. But when I entered the rental car facility, it became clear that superior powers had thwarted my plans. A ragged line of humanity, stinking of air-travel sweat, spiraled out from the hopelessly overmatched desk. Two agents were on staff, and each seemed to take an eternity with every aggrieved customer. It was going to be an hour, at minimum, before I was behind the wheel. My girlfriend decided that this was distinctly not her problem and Ubered off to the hotel pool as I painfully waited my turn. We trudged forward at a glacial pace while a migraine spread across my temple. As it always seems to do, the rental industry was trying to kill me.
In a more humane society, the rental car process would be quick and simple, perhaps even automated. You’d book your reservation online, scan a QR code at the rental facility, and drive off the minute your luggage left the carousel. This is what the rental business aspires toward, actually, but for now, we’re left with what I believe is the single most maddening, inefficient element of America’s travel infrastructure: Every time I rent a car, I find myself 27th in line, with two glassy-eyed employees standing behind a row of conspicuously empty desks and no end in sight.
This perdition has only grown more baroque and hellish during the post-COVID travel rebound, which has created dehumanizing rental car shortages and skyrocketing prices across the country. In 2021, at the peak of the mania, the Atlantic noted that day rates were jumping to $300—for some unbearably shitty cars, no less—as scarcity reigned supreme. At one point in 2021, more than 1 in 3 cars that were available before the pandemic were no longer in service. In fact, prices increased as much as 58 percent between August 2020 and August 2021, which tanked customer satisfaction rankings across the industry. Travel has been optimized, digitized, and disrupted in literally every other capacity, but somehow, rental cars never escaped the dark ages.
Surely it doesn’t have to be this way, right? A better world must be possible, right? Well, according to Gregory Scott, who does public relations for the American Car Rental Association—a lobbying firm for the rental industry—the chaos of this business isn’t all their fault.
“Let’s say we have five airplanes that come in at the exact same time due to weather,” he said. “We may have cars sitting there, but we’re expecting a steady stream of passengers for that two-hour period. Now there’s a flood of customers and they’re all renting from Avis. All of a sudden, a line forms. It’s the last thing we want to have happen. Sometimes, it’s unavoidable. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes.”
Scott describes an auto rental economy that, by its basic nature, is prone to malfunction. Logistical breakdowns, like an incoming flight crunch, are part of the territory. There’s an overwhelming number of moving parts in a rental agency, he argues, and all of them are ready to topple over onto each other like dominoes.
Case in point: The No. 1 hinge point of a smooth operation is a constant flow of vehicles returning to headquarters, where they are cleaned and sanitized in preparation for the next customer. So, if a customer is late, and one car is removed from the total supply, the stock is reduced by one. This is relevant because companies like Hertz and Enterprise don’t earmark specific cars for drivers. Instead, they make an educated guess evaluating the average number of vehicles they’d need on a specific afternoon, which is based on past trends and calendar fluctuations. When a rental company’s speculative math doesn’t correspond with reality, the line at the counter can get out of hand very, very quickly.
“What most customers don’t understand is that the rental company isn’t putting a car aside for you,” explained Jonathan Weinberg, founder of the rental car deal aggregator AutoSlash. “They estimate what the demand might be on a particular day, and take it from there. The rental car industry can have a no-show rate of 30 percent or more, and that’s significant, because it means that a third of your customers might not show up. So, if you estimate that 23 percent of the customers are going to no-show, and only 18 percent of them do, suddenly you’re in a bind.”
This is exacerbated further by the fact that the vast majority of car rentals—unlike hotel bookings or airline tickets—are nonbinding. If you reserve a Ford Focus (or a “similar vehicle,” in rental car company parlance) four months in advance, your credit card won’t be charged if you don’t arrive to pick it up. This dynamic lends itself to the no-show problems Weinberg outlined, and if you wish to be extremely charitable to the car companies, you can make the case that it’s nearly impossible to effectively juggle incomplete information about who, exactly, will be at DFW airport at their prescribed time slot.
However, the core issue underlying all of these logistical kerfuffles is how dramatically the rental car industry responded to the fallow COVID-19 period, when travel dropped to historic lows. The pandemic devastated the business of renting cars—Hertz filed for bankruptcy protection shortly after the lockdowns began—and the major players in this sector stayed afloat by selling off their fleet of cars for short-term profit. Avis, for instance, disposed of 250,000 cars in 2020, and Hertz had less than 300,000 vehicles in the country—42 percent less than in 2019. Rental companies also laid off hundreds of workers, leaving only a handful of people behind the counter to help with those ever-growing lines. Three years later, companies are still attempting to replenish their product back to pre-pandemic levels, but most experts concur that the shortage will last through the end of the year. Given the stark lack of vehicles, all of the loosey-goosey guesswork integral to this industry suddenly has much less room for error.
“It’s still tight,” said Scott. “We don’t have the flexibility, or the cushion, that we had in 2019. That’s not going to resolve itself till 2024, when all the manufacturers get fully back online.”
Scott, of course, is an advocate for rental business—the American Car Rental Association is a special interest group that spent $155,000 on lobbying expenditures last year—so I’m not surprised by his outlook on the nightmares of travel. Yes, there’s some truth that every industry is at the mercy of an opaque and unknowable global supply chain—especially one that was rocked by an unprecedented tragedy—but it’s also true that the rental industry could institute a few reforms that could easily streamline some of the problem areas. Seriously, why must I interface with a clerk for 15 minutes before being handed the keys? I understand that a few waivers might need to be signed, but with all of my other information on file, surely the process can be completed much faster. Weinberg concurred with my assertion, and unveiled a dark truth: If the system were more optimized, he said, it would be more difficult for companies to tack those mysterious extra charges onto our bottom line.
“There’s some element of getting the customer to the rental car counter so we can offer them upgrades,” he explained. “They can offer you insurance, or sell these add-ons. That’s one reason they like to do that. One important thing to understand is that rental car agents are commissioned salespeople. They’re being paid to sell you add-ons. They’re not trying to give you helpful advice.” (For what it’s worth, Weinberg says to never purchase the infernal “prepaid gas” scam.)
Both Scott and Weinberg believe that there’s at least one obvious recourse to this slog. The fairy tale of automation—where everything from the checkout process to the paperwork, and perhaps even the vehicle inspection, is handed over to the machines—would make it considerably easier to breeze through the queue. In fact, Weinberg argues that the future is already here, so long as you know where to look. Alamo has a free “Skip the Counter” service available at 40 airports—all that’s required is to fill out a brief form before your pickup date, and you’ll be in your Toyota Corolla in no time. (Similar services are available at Avis, Budget, and Hertz, though those require you to sign up for a loyalty program.) In other words, the skeleton of a lightspeed land, scan, and go vehicle transaction is coming into view.
Scott says that these modernizations are the industry’s prime directive. But I also get the sense that automation isn’t entirely designed to assist us hapless customers. Given how rapacious the auto rental business tends to be, I wasn’t surprised when Scott mentioned how labor costs are a major drain on the industry’s bottom line. Handing off all of those duties to the all-powerful machines will drive up profits, especially in comparison to some of the more tangible revamps on the table. In other words, making sure rental desks are fully staffed—with humans—is apparently a radical idea.
“Our goal is to have you come in contact with not a single person by the time you get dropped off at the service area of the airport,” Scott explained. “We want the whole thing to be completely automated by your smartphone. You go to a car and scan a code. If it’s outside of your price range, it’ll ask if you want to upgrade or downgrade, and you won’t talk to a single agent.”
In that sense, Scott sounds like so many of the other business titans who are leveraging the algorithms as a way to reap progressively more grim streams of capital. Hollywood is currently in stasis because studio executives are flirting with box offices built by derivative, A.I.-computed scripts—something that nobody, least of all consumers, desires. Media companies are experimenting with god-awful ChatGPT-fabricated blog posts as a way to juice vacant engagement—a content strategy that thoroughly abandons why people visit websites in the first place. So it’s hard to take an executive at face value when they say automation is intended to help us rather than them. The track record is what it is.
And even if you set aside the employment loss in this hypothetical high-tech future, the people who work these stressful, low-paying rental agent jobs aren’t even sure the new system will solve the biggest problems for the industry. One current Enterprise employee who asked to remain anonymous said he is skeptical that full-on automation could ever be a suitable replacement for the basic grammar of communication with a salesperson. “I’m not sure how that would work. It could be used for certain tasks, but it’s never perfect,” he said. “You would lose money from cars being returned damaged and from customers stealing them.” (Scott countered by saying some sort of security apparatus would be in place, even in this utopian rental future.)
The Enterprise employee raises a good point, though: High-tech solutions don’t always bear high-tech results. Sometimes they can even make things worse. You know all of those self-checkout aisles that have taken up permanent residence in grocery stores? The ones that allow us to ring up our own milk and eggs? Ideally at lightning speed? Research shows that they haven’t actually reduced the total queue times—especially when you factor in the frequent, flagrant malfunctions, all of us helplessly placing our produce in the “bagging area” over and over again before a beleaguered attendant steps in to intervene. Will those same problems pop up at a more digitized Hertz queue? I fear the worst.
Still, by hook or by crook, I do hope we eventually tear down the decaying rental infrastructure in order to rebuild a rental car system that is several degrees saner than the one we’ve inherited. It would be a boon for everyone involved. Rental companies would be able to service customers much more quickly, and I would no longer feel a bone-deep dread as soon as I deboard the plane. Let freedom ring, let the chains be broken, let us never feel ourselves slowly decomposing as we wait two hours for a Hyundai Sonata at O’Hare International ever again.
