Even services like Travelocity and Priceline are silos, just ones that combine the silos of hotel, airline and car rental companies.
Frequent business travelers are the most lucrative customers for car rental companies, and when they travel someone else pays their bills.
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By auto manufacturers, by insurance companies, by car rental companies, by marketers.
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Although car rental companies now quote rates including taxes, sticker shock is not uncommon when you finally see that hotel or restaurant bill.
Whereas traditional car rental companies choose standard cars in the dullest colors of the rainbow, the first Zipcar was a tricked-out lime-green Volkswagen Beetle.
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It operates online travel portals such as expedia.com, hotels.com and hotwire.com that help connect travelers with travel suppliers such as hotels, airlines, cruises and car rental companies.
Punch in your membership information just once for your various loyalty programs (airlines, hotel chains, car rental companies and credit cards), and AwardWallet will continuously fetch your latest points balances and expiration dates.
And meta-search sites like Kayak and Sidestep try to earn a buck helping you find the cheapest among all of the above, plus the sites of airlines, hotels and car rental companies.
There are talks with Europcar, one of the largest car rental companies in Europe, to offer smart owners a 20 percent discount on rentals so they have access to larger vehicles when needed.
In an age where green travel and eco-focused marketing continue to grow, car rental companies are bolstering their rental fleets with electric and hybrid cars, giving travellers the opportunity to reduce their carbon footprint, save money at the pump and take one of these new-technology vehicles for a spin before perhaps buying one of their own.
The deal would leave only two large-cap car-rental companies trading in the public markets: Hertz, based in Park Ridge, N.
As a result, they are able to deliver services at much cheaper prices than traditional car-rental companies, hotels, universities and encyclopedias.
Airlines, hotels, and car-rental companies could offer price comparisons on their own sites, a model successfully adopted by US insurance companies.
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Car-rental companies, for example, will be able to use mobile devices to inform their clients of their rental status, service requirements, lease extensions and other vital information in real time.
Additionally, the U.S. car rental business came under pressure from fleet constraints and associated efforts by rental car companies to drive up pricing.
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Recently an executive with a major insurance firm shared a story about his experience with Enterprise Rent-A-Car, top in the 2010 JD Powers customer satisfaction study among rental car companies.
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At the time, there were two rental car companies in the U.S., Hertz and Avis.
Hotels and rental car companies may either refund or issue credit for a future stay.
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Since September 11, the day of the disaster, the rental car companies have gone on a roller coaster ride.
Fields, Office Max and various rental car companies, just to name a few.
Excluding sales to fleet buyers such as rental car companies, Honda is No. 1, said Mike Acavitti, senior vice president of marketing for American Honda.
Spokesman Nick Richards blames the slow growth on a cut in low-profit sales to fleet buyers such as rental car companies as GM tries to boost the brand's resale values.
We tend to think of them as alternatives to traditional car rental, but companies like Getaround see themselves as social enterprises designed to serve the greater good by reducing traffic and air pollution.
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The losses carry on down the line to the concessionaires who feed spectators, vendors who provide hundreds of portable toilets, rental car companies that supply vehicles, hotels that house pilots and crews, and providers of aviation fuel.
Also worth noting: Ju points out that Priceline has a higher percentage of its gross bookings and profits from hotels than other OTAs, which makes the company less subject to supply restrictions from rental car companies and airlines.
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Funded by a consortium of hotels, airlines and rental-car companies, it was meant to be a comprehensive travel-reservation system.
Private equity has shuffled all the mattress and rental-car companies it can.
Finally, there are some real costs that the rental companies are passing on: Airports charge high rents to tenants like car rental agencies, so the cost of maintaining a special area for refueling is somewhat higher than it is for a typical highway gas station.
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Qiming Ventures has five Chinese portfolio companies in the cue to go public soon: ramped up car rental service eHi from Shanghai, dating site Jiayuan, online video programming PPLive, social networking service Kaixin001 and kids entertainment site Taomee.
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