[aes256]

I don't see much potential here.

Airport car rental is mostly grunt work. Moving cars, storing them, valeting them, maintaining them, filling them with gas, sorting out insurance, customer service, screening customers, chasing late returns, pursuing people for damages, so on and so forth. 5% booking interface, 95% on the ground work.

There is already healthy competition in the market, and the incumbents do a pretty good job. There are lots of moving parts, so things often go wrong, but it's hard to do better.

Who cares about a shiny iPhone app? The existing companies already have passable online interfaces, and if they don't already have iPhone apps they have the capital to roll one out in a matter of weeks and crush any looming competition.

I give both of these startups 12-24 months, and the end won't be pretty.

[ricardobeat]

"A pretty good job" (not so pretty when you are waiting in-line for an hour) is not enough. If they can do the grunt work just as well, or better wrt refuelling/cleaning, and a better booking system, they will win.

You also missed the picture of car sharing.

[aes256]

> "A pretty good job" (not so pretty when you are waiting in-line for an hour) is not enough.

You can bet the leading companies have already invested huge amounts seeking out efficiency savings and ways to improve customer satisfaction.

Slow moving and bogged down in bureaucracy they may be, but if there were a simple way to avoid common customer complaints (e.g. long queues) without hurting the bottom line, they would already be doing it.

> You also missed the picture of car sharing.

I can't think of anyone I know who would even consider sharing their car. It's just an absolute minefield. It might just about work on a small scale, where you know and trust the people you are sharing with, but that kind of thing doesn't scale.

[ricardobeat]

The big names are trying to do the same: Hertz On Demand, Avis on Location, etc. But they probably generate lots of revenue from the extra fees and hidden costs, so they have less of an incentive to switch to more friendly setups.

It's a warming thought that companies are always looking to improve customer experience, but more often than not, they will not do something because it doesn't improve the bottom line, not the opposite. And "hurting the bottom line" depends on the business model, that's where the market can be disrupted.