Credit Crisis - Car Hire Companies

Helphire Group plc, a car hire company in Bath which provides replacement cars for blameless people who were involved in accidents, had to make another 180 redundancies. That takes their total lay offs for 2009 to 300.

This medium sized car hire group had 3,000 employees working from more than 30 offices in Bristol and Bath, but the remaining 2,700 staff will now all be based Bath. Representatives for the company refused to rule out the fact that more jobs may still be lost.

But Car giant Europcar is determined not to be brought down by the financial crisis and has come up with a novel scheme to combat it – pay as you go car hire to help cash strapped customers.
The scheme will go live on April 1, 2010, at selected urban locations across Great Britain. These include the cities of Birmingham, Manchester and London.

Speaking on behalf of Helphire Group plc, marketing director Catriona Lougher said: “We already offer rentals by the hour, delivery and collection and the UK's widest choice of rental cars.
“Soon customers will even have the choice to take one of our metered vehicles which will prove really cost-effective for short journeys.
"We'd be fools not to test this concept on our customers fully before our launch in 2010 but we really hope this will prove to be a way forward for urban car rental.”

To implement the scheme the cars will be fitted with meters which take £1 coins and the cars will cost £1.04 per mile. Change machines will be in operation at all of Europcar’s 200 offices in the United Kingdom so that car hire customers will not have to worry about running out of money.
The Europcar fleet will start with £10 worth of mileage on the meter but after that customers will need to pay as they go.

This move by Europcar follows a new money saving trend among car hire companies to rent, rather than own, their fleet of cars. Renting cars saves them from making long term financial commitments, in the same way that the pay as you go car hire facility is saving their customers.