While business and upscale leisure travelers often prefer taking advantage of cheap travel deals, such as cheap airplane tickets, discount hotel rooms, cheap vacation packages and discount travel packages that does not necessarily mean that they will only consider cheap auto rentals.
Silvercar is a new car rental company that is only renting Audi A4s. Its approach to business is being compared to a cross between Southwest Airlines approach to fleet management, Zipcars approach to mobile technology, with 200 brand new Audi A4s added to the mix.
Silvercar was launched on January 14th and initially will operate a single location at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. Its idea is to take best business practices from other top notch travel companies and in the process eliminate the usual annoyances of renting a car.
Silvercar takes the traditional rental car counter out of the equation transferring the experience into a virtual and mobile domain. Its system is based on Silvercars mobile app. Renters using their mobile devices can manage their entire booking from making a reservation to unlocking their car to receiving their receipt when the car is returned.
The app is currently available for iOS and Android devices. Others can reserve online or through on site staff.
The companys CEO was formerly Zipcars chief technology officer. His idea was to take car sharing technology and put it in a private fleet.
The company is offering only silver A4s for rental. It got the idea of using a single car type based on Southwest Airlines using a single airline type. The idea was to keep things simple from an operational standpoint.
This also results in the customer not trying to guess what category or class of car he should try to reserve. Renters have been known to be unpleasantly surprised by what they get when reserving a full size or intermediate class of car.
The single car approach distinguishes Silvercar from major rental companies that try to be all things to all renters. Instead it is targeting business and upscale leisure travelers who often want a nicer car and dislike standing in line at a rental counter.
Experts view car rental counters as one of the least efficient and least favorite parts of business travel. Business travelers want to fly in, enter their cars, and get on the road as quickly as possible. When they return they just want to drop off their cars and head for the airport.
Speed and convenience are enhanced with Silvercar rentals because renters can take any car on the lot. They simply use their smartphones to scan a QR code on any car windshield. This pops the locks, activates the reservation, raises the exit gate, tracks gasoline consumption, and syncs the renters mobile device for hands free use.
When returning a car the vehicles navigation system causes the facilitys gate to rise, calculates the gas used, and creates a receipt that it automatically emailed to the driver, with no waiting on the lot for an attendant.
Silvercar is targeting 5 percent of the airport market, a niche that includes business travelers as well as upscale leisure travelers. All Silvercar rentals include in dash navigation, satellite radio, and in car Wi-Fi, all of which usually cost extra elsewhere.
Silvercar rentals are less expensive than some might expect. A recent search for a two day rental in mid February came up with a total price of $312 for two days, which was more than a Nissan Maxima from Enterprise ($260) but less than a Chevy Impala from Avis ($352).
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