We’re all being encouraged to save the environment and travel by train, so why are there so few car-rental offices at stations? Stanley Slaughter investigates.

When people travelling by rail in France or Germany arrive at their destination station, they are likely to have a choice of ways to continue their journey. Among these choices will be hiring a car.

All major stations in these two countries, and many smaller ones, have car-hire offices on the station concourses. At a major city like Bordeaux there are five or six, and there is even a choice at much smaller ones like Avignon. In Germany, there are 150 stations with car-hire offices, including 90 providing a service run by the national rail network Deutsche Bahn (DB).

In the UK, if you find a car-rental office at your arrival station you will be lucky. Europcar/National has seven, which will rise to 14 by 2009. This compares with 300 between the two brands on the continent. Avis has offices at a number of mainline stations including Waterloo, Euston, Manchester and at Ebbsfleet International, but most British stations have nothing. This is a stark contrast, which seems to expose once again the absence in the UK of that fabled beast, an integrated transport system.

But it is not just that countries like France and Germany use rail far more for long-distance journeys than the British. For example, in France the trip between Paris and Lyon – about 20 miles shorter than London-Newcastle – takes two hours on the TGV and that is the way most business people travel. In the UK, London-Newcastle is still seen by many as an journey to be made by air.

It goes deeper than that. Oliver Ueck, UK sales and marketing manager for Deutsche Bahn, says: “People move from door to door, not from railway station to railway. Whether you go by bike or car to or from the station, we try to make it as easy as possible.”
DB operates a car-hire scheme where you can register, take a vehicle for a set period and then return it (on the same model as the streetcar.co.uk system available in some parts of Britain). There is a similar system for bikes at some German stations. If travellers have a Bahn Card, issued by DB for regulars, they will get a discount on their car or bike hire. This is in addition to the usual car-hire companies with offices at stations.

The British reply is that few stations in the UK have the space for car-hire companies to keep their vehicles in, and where there is space, the station owners (often the train-operating companies) prefer to use it for taxi ranks or car parking. They can earn far more on the latter and as David Alexander, operations and franchise director for Europcar UK, points out, they “have to protect their interest”. 

While a “door-to-door” philosophy exists in the UK as far as plane journeys go – all airports seem well stocked with car-hire companies – it does not carry over to rail. Granted that travellers arriving by rail in London or other major cities can opt for public transport or a cab, those arriving at smaller cities would benefit from car-hire facilities. At Truro, the county town of Cornwall, Hertz has an office at the station, but for Avis it is a ten-minute cab ride away. 

Alexander says: “From a business traveller’s point of view, there is an increasing wish to use trains, whether for environmental reasons or for convenience. But at the end of the line there is nothing in cities like Stockport, Crewe or Swindon. So what do you do? We are all missing a trick here. But it is very difficult to find the spaces and facilities to run an efficient operation.

“The space is often reserved for taxi ranks. There is little regard for parking for rental companies. We have an operation at Euston with a small number of slots in the car park and a kiosk which can transact the rental. We are looking at the options but it is all about space.”

One alternative, which Europcar offers, is to deliver rented cars to passengers as they come off their train. This seems at least an acknowledgement that business travellers need efficient service, but the service comes at an extra charge. For a hire of two days or more, it might be good value, but for a shorter period, a cab is likely to be less expensive.

Avis is equally aware of the problem. Daniel McCarthy, its UK commercial director, says: “In the UK we have a huge amount of Avis rental locations within a stone’s throw of mainline railway stations. In fact, this is one of our key criteria when looking for locations for our rental offices in towns and city centres – we always try to ensure that our customers are as close to public transport links as possible.”

Hertz has also recently promoted Alfredo Ruiz Plaza to vice-president regional operations Europe, with overall responsibility for Italy, Spain and the UK. In his previous role with the company, he significantly increased the number of rental offices at railways stations, and he has a similar brief in his new job. Talks are also being held in the UK with train-operating companies to try and improve the situation. But again Alexander stresses the lack of space and the more attractive returns on car parking. “There are very, very few options,” he says.

CAR RENTAL ROUND-UP

Avis has extended its Preferred Members “three-minute promise” to all major UK airports, following successful trials at Heathrow. The service guarantees that members of Avis’s loyalty scheme will have their car keys and printed rental agreement within three minutes of entering Avis premises, or receive an apology and a £20 retail voucher.

The scheme is already in place in 390 locations across Europe, including 18 Avis branches in France, where
the company says it has achieved an average 99.7 per cent success rate. Visit avis.co.uk.

Europcar is to add CO2 emissions data to descriptions of its rental cars to help customers meet environmental requirements. Cars will be divided into emissions categories ranging from an average of 130g/km (such as the Peugeot 107) up to 230g/km (for example, the Volvo V70). Europcar says it is also researching technologies such as biofuel, HDi and BlueMotion in order to introduce a sub-120g/km CO2 emissions group.

In other news, Europcar will open its first branch in Beijing this week. Initially, the firm will offer a chauffeur service for travel within the city, as well as transfers between the city centre and Beijing’s Capital International airport. Visit europcar.com.

Budget Rent a Car has added 80 locations in Germany to its European portfolio. The expansion follows the merger of Budget’s German licensee Alag AG and local car-rental operator Robert Straub GmbH, and means that the company now has outlets at 140 locations across the country.

Meanwhile, Budget has extended its trial of hybrid vehicles to Heathrow airport, following their initial introduction at Edinburgh airport last year. The company is also trialling Saab and Volvo biofuel cars at a number of its locations in Sweden. Visit budget.co.uk.