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Car hire services have been with us for nearly as many years as the motorcar itself. Today it is a multi million pound industry that is a major player in travel and tourism providing travellers with a means of getting from A to B. In the beginning however the industry was supposedly started by an American called Joe Sanders.

It was Sanders in 1916 that had the idea of letting Model T Fords to travelling salesmen as a means of making money. A rather personable tale of debatable truth is that the first customer to use a hire car was a salesman who needed a car to take a local girl out for a date. Since this point onwards, car rental has been a great way for people to make the most of their leisure time.

The car hire industry has faced challenges throughout its history however. In the beginning not many members of the public actually owned motor vehicles and public transport was not great. This changed, particularly in America when the railways truly opened up the country although entrepreneurial rental companies made the most of the railways placing offices in stations all over the United States.

This sort of strategy has been used by nearly all car hire companies in the modern age. The advent of air travel and the opening up of air transportation to the masses has meant that rental companies now must host services within airports to extract reasonable profits.

Today airport rental offices are key links in the corporate chain, earning a large percentage of company profits. The car hire desks in airports are no different from those placed in railway stations over seventy years ago; they still provide travellers with a ready means of onward travel from a central terminal to more remote areas.

In the UK the history of car hire is closely linked with that of the USA. Companies soon became multinational and opened offices in the UK to provide rental solutions to the British public. Like the USA, UK rental companies had to compete with public transport in order to generate profits. Today however this has become less of a problem, with the hugely exaggerated costs for train tickets and the unreasonable slow journey time of coaches a hire car is now a viable option. This is especially true if travelling in a large group when the acquisition of a rental vehicle can work out far cheaper than tickets for all.

Rental companies do not purely rely on leisure customers to generate income however; larger hire companies have an extensive list of corporate clients who regularly utilise rental services. This is fundamentally the bread and butter for rental companies who know that a certain amount of income will be gained with the corporate clients no matter what is happening in terms of seasonal leisure activities.

From its humble beginnings giving travelling salesmen the chance to take local girls out for dinner the car hire industry has become a behemoth in the world of travel and tourism. At times the industry as a whole has had to adopt strategies to ensure its survival such as the placement of depots in railway stations and airports.

In the future it is likely that many companies will adopt environmental policies to cater for customers’ eco-conscience as well as utilise GPS technology to help secure fleets from theft. Whatever does happen in coming years, the industry has evolved to meet the needs of customers no matter where they are and what type of vehicle they need; undoubtedly this will continue.