Tromso

What day and time is the best day to pick up a rental car, i.e. when is the best selection at the PC-area?
It seems to me that Sundays are good, but Mondays most cars are rented out when I come to pick a car.

manohman

6 or 7am monday

91StealthES

I’ve found that Thursday evening and Friday mornings are good as that’s when most weeklong business travelers are returning their vehicles.

jackal

That's probably the best balance point for any market that is both business- and leisure- heavy, because the business travelers are returning home but the weekend vacationers haven't yet picked up. Once you start getting later in the day on Friday, the vacationers are picking up their cars.

Monday morning can work, too, but many business travelers fly in Monday morning or even Sunday evening if they have a week-long engagement.

Every stall in the PC area at PDX was full at 9pm last Saturday night, and the selection was quite excellent, so weekends can be good, especially if it's not peak tourist season or a market where business travel is larger than leisure travel (i.e. the fleet is sized for a heavy business travel demand and so there are lots of cars left over even over the weekend). In markets where leisure travel dominates, the reverse might be true and the stalls might be cleaned out over the weekend.

NYC is very heavily weekend-rental oriented, since cars are of limited use for business travelers and many NYC residents don't own cars so rent for the weekend.

UKGrad

Interesting points. Thoughts on how the dynamic changes at the end of Memorial Day weekend? Aiming to reserve for late Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning.

AutoSlash

Non-scientific, but I collated a sample of the data we have, and it seems to indicate that you should be absolutely fine, because as the weekend goes on, the number of returns continues to significantly outweigh the number of rentals, so the longer you wait, the more cars any given location should have on hand.

Date: Rentals / Returns
5/24: 635 / 141
5/25: 658 / 163
5/26: 262 / 300
5/27: 259 / 443
5/28: 179 / 898
5/29: 206 / 657

Comparing it to a relatively normal weekend (the following weekend):

5/31: 423 / 211
6/1: 468 / 198
6/2: 385 / 348
6/3: 167 / 465
6/4: 174 / 419
6/5: 224 / 295

UKGrad

Wow, staggering difference on Monday and Tuesday. Thanks for the data!