Its interesting to hear the conspiracy theories that pop up when something goes wrong.

But in actuality, its very business oriented. Lets start with the one way rental.

A one way rental, or hundreds of one way rentals, takes time to get the car back to the home location.

In a snowstorm situation with cancelled flights, hundreds of peeps are going to try and find some way to get home, by any means necessary. That puts rental car locations in a bind.

lets say they allow.....for the sake of argument, 50 one way car rentals.

50 cars, to multiple locations, that are only 1 day rentals, maybe two.

If the car was returned to the same airport, then those cars would be back for upcoming rentals 1 or 2 days later.

If those cars went, 3-4 states away, it will take, in the best case scenario, 4 days to get the cars back to the home airport. That means that your really dealing with a 4 day unavailability going into a tight rental weekend.

so, as a manager, if confronted with flight cancellations, I would look at the total available cars for the next week or two. Figuring the best case scenario to get cars back, and worst case, I determine the amount of rented cars for one way rentals I can deal with. If i do NOT do this, then I end up having someone (sometimes you) sitting at my station with no car and a confirmed reservation.

Each company is different. Each rental is different. The last major storm I dealt with, I approved each one way rental, the employees needed to call me to each rental to approve it. I turned down at least 30 people, but not all at once. As soon as someone at another city rents a car and says they are returning to my location, my computer will reflect it. So I look for each request, not issue a blanket statement, for one way rentals in that situation.

The only time I do not follow this procedure is when I am completely overbooked at a future date (up to 2 weeks in the future). Usually in that case, I may "wedge" my reservations.

A wedge is a reservation tool where I allow 1,2,3 day rentals, deny 4,5,6,7 day rentals, but allow 8,9,10 day rentals.

As the date gets closer, I sell out certain days.

Allow 3+ days rentals, but deny 1 and 2 day rentals.

You may ask "why" do you stop rentals at all if you have available cars or why deny 1,2,3 days and allow greater than 3?

we have reports that show what our average rental days are. Some business centers have average rental days of 1.2-1.7 days per rental. Other rental locations can have average rentals in excess of 5 days per rental (florida). If I block 1,2, allow 3 day rentals for a florida location, it wont slow down rentals AT ALL. In florida, to slow down rentals, I would close out 1,2,3,4,5,6, allow 1 week or more.

At a business center, lets say san Jose, I could slow down rentals just by blocking 1,2 day rentals.

why not block all rentals? the idea is to slow down rentals as much as possible, while bieng available. Plus a one week rental is good money. Only have to clean cars once a week, as compared to 4-5 times a week.

A manager once told me " I want to rent 100% of my fleet for 28 days, get em all back on the 28th day, clean the cars, and rent em again for 28 days.

hes right.

Incidentally, if its sold out for 1 day rentals, book the car for two or three days, return it after one day. But make sure the rental doesnt have a "saturday night overstay" or "48 hour minimum" attahed to the rate.