Tales from the car wash, my time behind the scenes at Calgary’s largest car rental co
Because of my fairly fruitless two-year quest to start and run a profitable business, I’ve been feeling both broke and bored recently, so I took on a 90-day contract with one of the big car rental companies starting this August. The job basically is night shift manager for the guys who clean and move the vehicles at the central facility located near the airport. When I was offered the job, I was told the requirements were threefold. 1) to show up for the shifts I was scheduled 2) to carry a clipboard and keep track of the guys so they didn’t slack off and 3) not get a union grievance filed against me. Sounds simple, right? So far, I’m succeeding, but it’s a lot harder than it sounds!
Let me start this off by saying, no, I CAN’T get you a deal on vehicle rentals. I don’t even get deals, and I have nothing to do with pricing or reservations. I can’t even get you an upgrade, although I have some tips to help you maximize your chances. I also won’t mention which company this is for. It’s one of the two largest in town, and probably the largest. If you want you can probably figure it out. From what I’ve heard the other shops work pretty much the same way here in Calgary and also in other cities around Canada.
I'll post up some thoughts on a few topics, but I'm also open to answering any questions people might have, AMA style.
- - - Updated - - -
Volume:
The service centre mainly services the Airport location. That’s 90% of the volume they deal with. Because of the space restrictions at the airport, there is no room to clean or refuel vehicles there, so they all need to be moved off airport to this service centre. It’s about a seven-minute drive each way. To give some idea of the scale off the operation, during the summer the airport will rent around 400 cars a day, and they have room to park around 65, so they need to constantly have clean cars moving towards them or they run out quite quickly. A single 747 can have 50+ people on it with reservations, and they all end up at the reservation counter at the same time. When that same 747 departs, it can have 50 people returning cars at the same time too.
To handle all these car movements from the airport to the service centre, they employ an army of shuttle drivers. FYI, this is a great job for semi-retired folks who enjoy driving. A lot of the staff are over 60 years old and they do a great job. Since it’s a 7-minute drive each way, and there’s a few minutes at each end, at best you can do one round-trip in 20 minutes. So a single driver in an 8 hour shift, after two coffee breaks and a couple trips to the bathroom can move about 21 cars each way per day. In reality, it’s very common for there to be too many returns at one time, or not enough, so the guys end up being a passenger for a good percentage of the trips.
So those 400 reservations for a summer Friday, that needs 20 guys working 8 hour shifts at best just to service. Throw in a little bit of one-way trips and some inefficiency or dicking around, and that number roughly doubles. That’s 40 guys a day seven days a week for the whole summer. That’s basically what it is, split into two shifts, starting as early as 5AM and going well past midnight on busy days. During the summer an evening shift shuttle driver can have overtime every day if they want.
In addition to the airport, this company also has five other locations inside the city. These take much less effort because they are supposed to clean their own cars, they fuel them at whatever gas station is nearby, and generally they only need more cars when they have higher than average reservations or a request for a more unique vehicle. Still, it takes a lot of time to move five cars from the airport to downtown during the day, and even late at night, that’s an hours round trip at best. Some summer Fridays the downtown location may require 30 additional cars to be delivered on top of the 40 or so cars they normally keep on hand. That’s a lot of man-hours.
They also own the locations in Banff, Jasper, Medicine Hat, Red Deer and a few others. For some reason they send a lot of cars back and forth to Banff, but the rest seem to handle themselves without much help from us.
- - - Updated - - -
Fleet:
So, let’s talk about the fleet. Firstly, it’s massive. Through the summer the fleet grows to just about 3000 cars for this one company alone. The second thing about the fleet is how much turnover there is . The vast majority of the vehicles are from the “big three” US companies, and those cars are on a 6-month buyback program. So no matter when that car showed up, or what the mileage is, it’s gone as soon as the calendar rolls over six months. Seriously, I’ve seen cars with under 10,000kms on the odometer heading to auction. It’s rare for anything to rack up more than about 25,0000 kms in that six months. That’s the deal they have with the manufacturer, and it’s pretty inflexible. These cars go through the Adesa dealer auction in Airdrie, and they mostly end up as “certified pre-owned” cars at dealerships. Yep those nice low mileage used cars at the dealership are mostly ex rentals.
Vehicles from any Asian or European manufacturer are sold as well, either through dealer auctions or directly to dealerships. That’s mostly Kia, Hyundai, Toyota, Honda, Volkswagen, Audi and BMW. These generally end up at a dealership somewhere, but it’s up to those dealerships if they slap the “certified” used vehicle status on them or not. Occasionally these do end up with higher mileage, like 50,000 kms. But not often much higher than that.
Through the summer, they are selling maybe 50 units a week. By fall when the vacation season is over, they are selling 200+ a week. Nearly the entire fleet is turned over every year.
They are also a licensed dealership as well, so they do sell a small number of vehicles themselves, although that's not a core piece of their business.
Originally Posted by killramos
Quote
