LIHU‘E — As rental-car prices soar and availability is scarce this summer on Kaua‘i, “the largest car-rental company in the U.S. and the parent company of the Enterprise Rent-A-Car, National Car Rental, and Alamo Rent A Car,” according to Forbes, have begun to add vehicles back into its fleet.
Enterprise Holdings, like the rest of the industry, is seeing increased demand for vehicles for travel across all areas of the nation.
“We anticipate this strong demand will continue throughout the summer,” said Lisa Martini of Enterprise Holdings.
“In addition to increased overall demand, other trends we are seeing are increases in the length of rentals and demand for specialty vehicles such as vans, pickup trucks, convertibles and large SUVs.
Martini said Enterprise Holdings took a very-thoughtful approach to its fleet strategy throughout the pandemic.
“While we reduced the number of vehicles in our fleet in spring 2020 when travel came to a virtual standstill, we did that thoughtfully to support ongoing transportation needs,” Martini said. “As demand started to return early last summer, we began adding vehicles back into our fleet and making commitments for new-vehicle purchases from our manufacturing partners so that we could refresh our fleet as we normally would, and also to meet the demand as it returned.”
However, Enterprise Holdings is still below pre-pandemic fleet levels. Yet Martini said its fleet is not down significantly.
“Our relationships with manufacturing partners remain strong, and our teams are working hard to secure additional vehicles — both new and low-mileage used vehicles — through all channels,” Martini said. “Our teams will continue to work hard to meet the increasing travel demand and support customers’ broader transportation needs.”
Enterprise Holdings encourages visitors to reserve vehicles as early as possible.
“Providing flexible travel dates and branch pick-up locations in your search may also help increase your options,” Martini said. “In fact, enterprise.com has added a feature that helps to redirect customers to other nearby locations — if available — during the online reservation process when they are booking if their selected location is showing no vehicle availability.”
Additionally, when it comes to rental-car pricing, Martini said the spring and summer travel season are the busiest time of the year, with many people traveling.
“Our rates are determined by several supply-and-demand factors, including location, dates of travel, length of rental, availability, as well as when the reservation was made,” Martini said.
