Enterprise focuses on the big players

When Enterprise started to see automobile supply problems after the pandemic hit in 2020, the car and truck rental, fleet management and mobility company decided to cater to its long-term customers.

Chrissy Taylor, CEO of the newly renamed Enterprise Mobility, emphasized rentals to businesses and insurance companies with clients whose cars were damaged in crashes.

Now that travel is back, Taylor sees rental cars growing again.

Taylor talked with The Associated Press about where her business is headed.

With a shortage of cars and trucks during the pandemic, but leisure travel making a big resurgence, what’s going on with your business now?

A third of our business happens in the airport and two-thirds happens in our suburban market. And our suburban market has been growing exponentially with our contracted business, which includes the corporate customers and the road warrior. They are back and they do travel regionally. So we do have a lot of that business, not just at the airport but in the home city, and then insurance replacement. People still have been driving the last several years, even with the pandemic. So accidents happen. And so we have long-term relationships with insurance partners. That business has also been back on track. Travel demand was through the roof, through the summer. We have also experienced that both domestically and globally and in Europe in particular. How did you end up with most of your business not being rental for travel?

We’re coming back online with our leisure customer. About 25% of our business is leisure and the rest is contracted. Rental vehicles got very expensive when the pandemic hit. Have prices stayed high and what do you see in the future?

As demand loosens, we have seen prices moderate year over year, but we’re happy where pricing is. People continue to travel.

Are you still seeing a shortage of vehicles because demand is high?

We definitely are not buying as many vehicles as we were pre-pandemic. Vehicle supply is down, but we are in a much better place.

Used vehicle prices shot up in 2021 and then dropped in 2022. But they’ve stayed high in part because of lack of supply coming from rental car companies returning vehicles to the market. Do you see that as normalizing?

We anticipate that it will most likely stay elevated. We do not have a crystal ball. We are monitoring that on an individual market basis, how we sell those vehicles after we’re finished with them with rental, how we sell them back to our dealerships, how many and at what price, who needs them. It’s very important to keep the residual value high for the manufacturers, making sure that the customer is getting a well-maintained and great vehicle.