Car Hire Club?

[F Bower]

I think it's an exciting business possibility for a medium sized car rental outfit. My brother does something similar - but in Cape Town so the area he has to cover is limited. We all probably know of local car hire companies which don't extend beyond Lazio/Abruzzo etc. As far as the big names are concerned, they already give discounts through advertisers so if Italy Mag were to advertise Hertz for example, Italy Mag would get a kick back but not necessarily the punters. Worth a try though.

[pigro]

personally I'm not very interested in just getting another "badged" discount via a 3rd party like ItalyMag - there are loads of these around, and all they really do is get you a fair market price at best. I'm more interested in the concept of finding (as you say) a smaller, possibly more local firm, to whom we may be a (relatively) big catch, and getting from them a "real" discount or other similar benefit that isn't going to be achieved by anyone who simply does a joint marketing promo with them to up their one off booking numbers.

I'd like someone at the hire firm to think (say) "300 members @ 5 days average per rental, @ 4 rentals average per member per year = 6000 car days per year we could lock in ongoing if we offer a real incentive". Add the driver risk stuff I mentioned earlier - and also possibly a more even distribution of usage over the year given that we (as home owners) will often travel out of season as well as just July/August - and the question is whether that's any sort of incentive to them.

[weeze]

I think this is an excellent idea Pigro but unfortunately I have no inside track on how to go about it. There must be 100s of Italy mag people out there with holiday homes in italy who rent a car several times a year and who, like you and I, go through the whole search process time and time again checking T and C and so on. Tedious.
In particular I don't understand why car hire firms offer no 'bulk' discount in the sense that renting for 2 weeks costs twice as much as renting for one. I would like to see a discount for committing to a particular supplier for a minimum of so many days a year over so many trips. They would gain loyalty and save admin costs. I have wondered whether smaller, local suppliers might consider this if approached but they are not usually at airports.
I'd be happy to do something active to move this idea along a bit - if i knew where to go next with it. Ideas anyone?
Thinking more laterally, and casting aside the idea that non-residents can't own cars, isn't it a shame that holiday house owners can't group together to share the use of a car.

[weeze]

Would a starting point be to see which airports people use? For instance, could we then approach a small firm a couple of km from Fiumicino/Ciampino?

[jepsonclough]

I think this is a great idea but I suspect the one of the difficulties would be the diversity of airports that people use - this is probably interesting for a small/medium operator but they won't have the coverage needed. Also there woudl be a legal contract involved - who woudl be the parties? As far as the big operators are concerned a lot of corporate clients get much better deals but that is because they are using their own insurance which is not something we could do. I suspect that the only chance is to get a discount from one of the big operators or for the commission paid to the referring site to be repaid somehow.

I disagree with you about less damage to cars though - although not causing any damage we return cars in a pretty messy state as at the moment our house is a building site so the inside is covered in dust, and we go through a ford to take a short cut to Servigliano so the outside is covered in mud!

Regarding reducing the excess - have you tried taking out an annual policy with someone like Cheap Car Hire Excess Insurance | Insurance4carhire.com ? For around £50 you can reduce your excess to zero.

Chris

[juliancoll]

As Jepsonclough says, a small/medium operator wont cover the whole of Italy as we travel through many different airports. Perhaps approaching operators at the top three airports used by members would enable you to forward your ideas to them.

I suppose I can hazard a guess that two of the top three would be Ciampino and Pescara