Comment by crtlaltdel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crtlaltdel | Hacker News Reader

can you quantify national chains being “inconvenient”?

i find those sorts of statements to be a sort of “biz-smell”. it is easy to make dismissive claims about incumbents...and dangerous when those claims do not clearly map to value statements about your product/service. They are “inconvenient because of X, unlike us because of our feature/service/attribute Y”.

if someone has never rented a car from a national chain, or if they have never had an issue doing so (which is my experience) your assertion without context may fall flat.

the uber voucher is neat, but i’ve had avis bring a car out to my house and drive me home after returning it to the lot. all i had to do was chat with a human for 1-2min and explain my personal logistics. my experience is an outlier...but informs my analysis of the “inconvenient” claim.

Regardless, great work launching! I will be looking forward to you expanding geographic coverage so I can give you a spin :)

If you're a frequent car rental customer and are part of some of the bigger companies' loyalty programs (Avis Preferred, National Emerald, etc.) and typically rent from airport locations, than the rental experience can actually be really great.

But in a lot of use cases, specifically for people living in big cities that don't own cars, the experience is slow and expensive. To use me as an example, when I was living in New York I wanted to go skiing in Vermont and needed a car for the weekend. On the several occasions I used one of the big car rental companies, I'd pay in excess of $80/day for a midsize sedan, trek to a branch which was often far from where I lived, and wait in line to sign a bunch of paperwork at a desk. Another thing I found problematic was that I never new exactly which model I was going to get until I got there.

Peer-to-peer services solve certain aspects of these problems but were, in my experience, inconsistent--sometimes the car was nearby and great and other times it was far away, dirty, and the host was unresponsive.

We're trying to combine the scalability and variety you get with peer-to-peer services and the consistency you get with direct-to-consumer car rental.

thanks for the thorough response!

i’m not now, nor ever have i been a member of a national chain’s loyalty program. as i had noted, my experience is an outlier. i’ve never had the dreaded endless-line issue, could handle two signature and a half dozen initial boxes without it being an undue burden (at the time). i never rent from airport locations, only local franchisees. this alone may account for my experience; a small franchise location in an area with a major airport may be more inclined to strive for great customer experience where possible. obviously my experience doesn’t scale!!

best of luck. i’m sure you will see success and light a fire under national chains to up their game. win:win

I find the downtown experience at the traditional car rental companies terrible too. All they have done in recent years is update the style of their websites a bit. The paperwork and line ups is insane. Uber and Zipcar have none of that. They need to spin-off a portion of their business to subbrands the way cell carriers have done. Or to Carve.

> If you're a frequent car rental customer and are part of some of the bigger companies' loyalty programs (Avis Preferred, National Emerald, etc.) and typically rent from airport locations, than the rental experience can actually be really great.

I'm none of those things, and when I've rented the experience has been great.

> On the several occasions I used one of the big car rental companies, I'd pay in excess of $80/day for a midsize sedan, trek to a branch which was often far from where I lived, and wait in line to sign a bunch of paperwork at a desk

Every rental agency I've rented with has had pickup service of some sort (in the last few years, usually Uber/Lyft ordered by the rental office), and because they are smaller footprint and have business driven by accessibility, they tend to be more conveniently located for more people than dealerships.

This is likely a New York specific thing, where Hertz is incredibly expensive in the city proper unless you go to the airport.

i can see that...though imo cost doesn’t (always) map to convenience...

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