Shapiro fondly remembers the days of the investment tax credit in the ‘80s and its positive contribution to his bottom line. It didn’t fly, because companies “didn’t want to give up their bad list because they’d rather you compile your own and have the losses associated with it,” he says.
Nonetheless, Shapiro recalls the “cannibalizing” of customers at the airport, where a representative from another car rental company would meet travelers - many with existing rental reservations - at baggage claim and lure them with a lower rate.Įlder recalls trying to gain consensus from other car rental companies to start a “do not rent” list. “With the smaller operators, there was some competition, but when you change your rates once a week, it’s not as competitive as changing them every hour,” he says. Shapiro contends that competition back then was “less fierce” than today, owing partly to the fact that his larger competitors didn’t pay too much attention to him. “The high fee to change an airline ticket benefitted us because it kept people to their initial schedules.”
“We had no idea when a car was going to check in, because local rentals aren’t very dependable, unlike airline reservations,” he says. We’d make calls to find rates because we didn’t have computer access to find this stuff out.”Įlder did a lot of local reservations and says that a 20% no-show rate was common. If you didn’t get reservations, you’d take another look and find they’d went beneath you. “You’d sit it out for two weeks and you didn’t bother to change. “When I came in the ‘80s, I’d look at how Thrifty was doing and I’d underneath them, because they had a better name than I did,” Shapiro says. Elder was a longtime board member of ACRA and served as its president.īoth Shapiro and Elder retired from car rental in the early part of the last decade. Shapiro was president and on the board of directors for both ACTIF (Association of Car and Truck Rental Independents and Franchisees) and the American Car Rental Association (ACRA).Įlder started his first Thrifty franchise in Alexandria, Va., in January 1970 and ended up with 40 locations, from mid-Pennsylvania to Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Richmond, Va., and the Tidewater area of Virginia. He operated two Florida locations, out of Orlando and Tampa, and took reservations for Payless. Shapiro started as an American International franchisee in 1981 and later broke off with several franchise owners to form Americar in the early ‘90s. The two provide some takeaways that car rental operators could use today. Here is a quick hit of remembrances, musings, advice and wisdom from two industry stalwarts. Jim Shapiro and Ken Elder may not have had to “walk 10 miles in the snow to get to school,” but they did grow up in car rental without the benefit of today’s systems, technology and information overload.
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