This Is the No. 1 Car Rental Company in the U.S., Study Finds

As soon as the remainder of your journey duties are finished — selecting a location, reserving flights, getting that improbable resort room secured — for many journeys, there’s one crucial factor left to do: e-book a rental automobile. By some means, it is typically the factor that will get left to the final second, maybe as a result of it seems like essentially the most daunting a part of the journey, as discovering a dependable and reliable rental service may be difficult. However, in response to the J.D. Power 2024 North America Rental Car Satisfaction Study, just a few firms rise to the highest as the very best of the very best. 

“When prospects really feel that an organization is genuinely centered on their wants and gives a seamless expertise, they’re extra more likely to belief that model and select it repeatedly,” Azari Jones, rental automobile follow lead at J.D. Energy, shared within the examine’s findings. “Belief fosters loyalty, enhances the corporate’s popularity, and differentiates it in a aggressive market. This results in greater buyer retention and optimistic word-of-mouth. With out this belief, even a widely known model might wrestle to take care of long-term relationships with prospects.”

As for what elements play into individuals’s stage of belief in a automobile rental company essentially the most, J.D. Powder famous that “overly sophisticated autos, issues skilled through the rental automobile expertise, and the shortcoming to decide on a particular automobile” usually tend to negatively have an effect on belief, thus damaging future loyalty to the model. “General, simply greater than half (53 p.c) of rental automobile prospects say it was very straightforward to function the options and facilities of their automobile, a difficulty rental automobile firms might want to begin addressing as in-car applied sciences develop more and more advanced,” it added. 

After crunching the numbers, the staff named Nationwide Automobile Rental the very best in general buyer satisfaction. 

To determine which firms had been greatest, the staff researched rental automobile firms in North America throughout seven key metrics: ease of rental, pick-up/drop-off, stage of belief, automobile, workers, worth for value paid, and digital instruments. It surveyed 8,379 enterprise and leisure vacationers who rented a automobile at an airport location through the previous 12 months, with responses collected between August 2023 and July 2024, after which gave them a normalized rating earlier than rating.

Whereas Nationwide ranks highest in general buyer satisfaction with a rating of 736, Enterprise got here in an in depth second with a rating of 726, adopted by Sixt with a rating of 708 in third. And these firms actually do outperform their competitors, because the staff discovered that the general buyer satisfaction for the trade is 688. Alamo, Hertz, and Ace all ranked greater than the shopper common.

See which of them must work on their recreation a bit to make sure higher satisfaction scores in 2025 at jdpower.com. And in case you want any extra recommendation out of your fellow vacationers on which automobile firm to select, try the winners of the Travel + Leisure readers’ 5 favorite rental-car companies in the 2024 World’s Best Awards.