Uber & Lyft Overtake Rental Cars Among Business Travelers

[rcjordan]

Rental car transactions have fallen 15 percentage points in two years. The decline isn't quite as steep as the one experienced by taxis, which fell 23 percentage points over the same period.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-21/uber-overtakes-rental-cars-among-business-travelers

[DrCool]

If I am going to a large city like Chicago, NYC, San Fran, etc. there is no way I am renting a car. Add in parking ($60+ a night in Chicago) and you would have to take a LOT of Uber rides to cover the cost of that and the rental car fees.

One area Uber and Lyft haven't seemed to tap yet is the family traveler. If I travel with my kids I pretty much would have to rent a car for the car seats. If Uber were to put out a fleet of mini-vans in some cities fully equipped with kids car seats they could pick up even more market share.

[rcjordan]

How do you pay the driver on Uber, directly or via drawdown from your Uber account? 

[DrCool]

It is all done through the app. You request a car, they pick you up, take you to your destination, and you get out of the car. Charged to your credit card on file. Makes it perfect for business travel because you can have your business credit card on file and get the receipts emailed to you. Very, very simple system.

[ergophobe]

Interesting. This correlates with a huge shift in VRBO and AirBnB which are grabbing more business travelers. It's still not a large percentage of business travelers or a large percentage of VRBO business, but three years ago it was essentially zero and, if I recall from the Portrait of the American Traveler (annual study), it's know in low double digits (so roughly similar to the penetration of Uber and Lyft and if I had to guess, I'd guess that there is huge overlap in those two markets).

This, I think, is part of why Expedia bought VRBO (by far the biggest player in the space) and why Trip Advisor is rebranding Flipkey as Trip Advisor Rentals and bringing it more to the fore.