Enterprise, National, Alamo top car-rental rankings
- Enterprise returns to No. 1 after dropping to No. 2 last year
- Hertz, a favorite of many business travelers, comes in at No. 4
- Fox Rent A Car comes in last
Enterprise Holdings' three rental car brands β Enterprise, National and Alamo β sweep the top three spots for satisfaction among airport customers, a survey of customers released Wednesday) by J.D. Power and Associates finds.
![An Enterprise rental car facility in downtown Chicago.](https://cdn.statically.io/img/www.usatoday.com/gcdn/media/USATODAY/USATODAY/2012/11/07/b03-biz-travel-1-16_9.jpg?width=660&height=373&fit=crop&format=pjpg&auto=webp)
It's the first time that all three of Enterprise Holdings' brands have finished at the top of the J.D. Power survey. The Enterprise brand, which finished No. 2 last year after seven consecutive years in the top spot, returns to No. 1 among a dozen brands travelers can choose from.
"Enterprise Holdings has continued to focus on the key drivers of customer satisfaction and created a culture with a service orientation," says J.D. Power Vice President Stuart Greif.
Hertz, a favorite of many business travelers, ranks No. 4 in customer satisfaction in the survey, which has been conducted annually since 1995.
Fox Rent A Car finishes last, and Payless Car Rental is next to last. And relatively unknown ACE Rent A Car, which ranked No. 1 in last year's survey, falls to No. 8.
"Smaller brands tend to have wider swings, because variability in performance in a relatively small number of their locations can have a larger impact on their scores than a brand with hundreds or thousands of locations," Greif says.
The challenge for all auto-rental car companies "is to perform consistently and at a high level, as Enterprise has demonstrated in seven of the last eight years it has been highest ranked," he says.
The survey β conducted on the Internet September 2011 through August 2012 and based on more than 12,100 evaluations of auto rental customers at North American airports β looks at six factors to measure overall customer satisfaction: costs and fees, pickup process, rental car, return process, reservation process and shuttle bus or van service.
The survey also finds that customers throughout the auto-rental industry are more satisfied with the rental companies than they were last year β or any year since 2006.
Of the six factors to measure overall customer satisfaction, only one β reservations process β scores lower in 2012 than in 2011.
"The rental-car industry continues to step up its game, building on improvements in the rental-car customer experience made over the past several years, while also benefiting from higher satisfaction levels with cost and fees relative to prior years," Greif says.