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Comment by aneth4 | Hacker News Reader

Airport car rentals tend to be pretty cheap (<$200/wk), available, and high quality. This poses a problem for any company attempting to "disrupt" the industry.

AirBNB is competing with high priced hotels that often are booked and an existing inefficient P2P subleasing business.

Uber is competing with taxi services notorious for poor responsiveness and frequent gaps in availability.

I don't see the same room for disruption in the airport car rental market, but there is likely some room for innovation. Don't count on Hertz and Payless quaking in their boots any time son.

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Indeed. People look at a car rental business and think 'I can offer better customer service'. Maybe, maybe not but that's only one of the necessary business lines.

Rental car companies are the largest buyers of new vehicles in the world, and more importantly the largest sellers of used cars. What's your strategy in those areas? What's your cost of working capital going to be? Ditto with insurance, these companies generally self insure the collision, can your startup afford to do that?

Then there's counter space at the airport. These generally come on the market rarely and at a different time and process for each airport. How are you going to compete when your lot is a twenty minute shuttle ride, and your competition has a lot in walking distance from the terminal?

I'm not saying it's impossible but the barriers to entry are high.

My only interest in renting cars is long term, greater than one week rentals.

I move often, and when I'm going to be in one place for more than a month I buy a cheap $1000 car. Then I sell it, usually for around $1000. Sometimes I take a loss, sometimes I make some money, it's a wash.

But when in I am in town for less than a few weeks, I rent. Always with Enterprise. Never on airport. In fact, I've taken hours of busses from the airport to save $100 on a rental.

I think it's easy. I go in, I sign a few times, we walk around the car and I leave. Done.

Getaround is cute but its too expensive, Flightcar sounds nice, but it amplifies all the problems that Getaround has.

Meh.

are you US based? I was trying to do the same a few years ago and found it was harder than expected to justify for short time periods with:

    - new license plates
    - state registration
    - sales tax
    - insurance
    - city stickers
    - title application and fees

I remember thinking it wasn't even worth it for me to do buy it and sell it on the 6 month time horizon (and I also couldn't find sub $1000 cars).

I'm asking from a place of envy, not challenge. Please teach me your ways. I must be doing this wrong. Would you mind shooting me an email: ezl@rocketlease.com

The biggest problem with car rental is the paper work - for some reason it can take five-ten minutes per customer to deal with, if nothing goes wrong. I've waited 20+ minutes on multiple occasions. There is literally no reason it can't be handled online well in advance (and it typically is, but for some reason it's repeated in person). Car rental needs something like airline self-service check-in kiosks more than FlightCar, IMO.

Join Hertz Gold and there is no paperwork. Totally worth it to me.

Join any "Gold" or "Executive" level offering from any car rental company. They've offered these plans for years--paperwork is handled when you join, and thereafter your wait time for a car is usually the amount of time it takes you to pull your member card out of your wallet.

This can be a problem, though I doubt an alternative airport parking based service would be much quicker.

As mentioned by others, Hertz Gold etc really ups the service, but it's usually not worth the 2-4x you pay on the rental.

I've found Payless and Fox both to be the cheapest and provide adequate service. I've had run-ins about fees and such, but generally I fell I get excellent value.

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