Welcome to the Nifti Insider

I’ve spent almost thirty years inside the car rental business, starting at a reservations desk answering phones and eventually working across just about every part of the business.

A large part of my career focused on international car rental, especially helping North American travelers rent cars in Europe. That meant pricing, distribution, operations, customer service, supplier relationships and all the machinery behind the scenes that most travelers never see.

Thirty years is a long time to look at one industry. Long enough to appreciate what it does incredibly well, and long enough to see where it makes things much harder than they need to be. And that’s really what this newsletter is about.

Car rental is a far more interesting business than most people realize. It’s also more complicated, more layered and, in some places, more confusing than it needs to be. Every week, I want to take one piece of it apart.

Sometimes that might save you money on a trip. Sometimes it might explain why something strange happened at a rental counter. Sometimes it’ll be about pricing, technology, distribution, customer service or where I think the industry is heading. And sometimes I’ll probably tell you something about car rental you had absolutely no reason to know until five minutes ago.

This first issue is the introduction: where this business came from, why I’ve spent most of my working life in it, and why I’m still interested enough to keep talking about it.

The automobile did something pretty remarkable when it arrived. It gave ordinary people a kind of freedom that had previously been difficult, expensive or simply unavailable: the ability to go where you wanted, when you wanted, on your own schedule.

There was just one obvious problem, though. Cars were expensive and most people didn’t own one. Even people who did occasionally found themselves somewhere their car wasn’t.

So almost as soon as there were automobiles, someone figured out that people might pay to borrow one.

One of the early stories comes from Omaha, Nebraska, where a man reportedly began renting out a Model T around 1916. The paperwork wasn’t exactly sophisticated. The terms were written down, the customer took the car, and off they went.

A few years later, operators began turning the idea into something more recognizable: actual fleets of cars, maintained and ready for the next customer. From there, car rental followed people wherever they went.

After World War II, commercial air travel expanded rapidly, which created an obvious opportunity. If someone gets off an airplane hundreds or thousands of miles from home, there’s a pretty good chance they’re going to need transportation. Putting rental cars at the airport was a simple idea, but it helped shape the industry for decades.

Then another part of the business grew outside the airport. Your own car is in the shop, you’ve had an accident, or you simply need something for a few days. Suddenly the neighborhood rental location made just as much sense as the airport counter.

Technology changed the business again. Computer reservation systems connected rental companies with travel agents and other distributors. The internet put rates directly in front of consumers. Online travel agencies and brokers gave travelers hundreds of options on one screen. Peer-to-peer platforms later asked an entirely different question: why does the car even have to belong to a rental company? And today, it’s difficult to have a conversation about the future of the industry without AI becoming part of it.

The business kept evolving, and through all of it, one thing undeniably improved: access.

Today, you can travel to another country, walk off an airplane and have a car waiting for you. We complain when it takes twenty minutes, which is probably the best evidence of how completely normal this fairly extraordinary thing has become.

Most people have rented a car, or certainly know somebody who has. And while it can be frustrating for reasons I’ll make clear along the way, it can also become part of the memory of a trip. Some people rent a car simply to get from point A to point B. Others take their families on long road trips, explore places they’ve never seen or drive through countries they’ve never visited.

Often, after your plane lands, one of the first things you look for is the rental counter or shuttle. Once you’ve got the keys, you’ve unlocked something more than transportation. You’ve got the freedom to explore on your own terms. And sometimes the vehicle itself becomes a surprisingly big part of the memory.

Before I get into some of the challenges, opportunities and changes shaping car rental today, I want to make something very clear. Car rental is an impressive business, and the people who make it work deserve more credit than they usually get.

Think about what has to happen every day. Millions of vehicles have to be purchased, financed, registered, moved, cleaned, fueled, repaired, priced and positioned. Demand changes constantly. Flights are delayed. Cars come back late. Customers arrive early. Someone damages a vehicle. Someone doesn’t show up. Someone absolutely needs the seven-passenger vehicle they booked because there are six people standing at the counter staring at you.

And somehow, most of the time, the whole thing works.

I spent decades around the people who make that happen: reservations agents trying to solve problems from hundreds of miles away, counter agents dealing with tired travelers late at night, fleet managers looking at tomorrow’s reservations and today’s cars and trying to make the numbers meet somewhere in the middle, pricing teams trying to predict demand, and the people moving and cleaning cars before most travelers are awake.

There are a lot of very good people in this industry, and nothing I write here is meant to lose sight of that.

So before we talk about where things can be clearer, smarter or better, credit where it’s due. The system works remarkably well.

Until it doesn’t.

Thirty years also gives you plenty of time to notice where things go wrong. Usually it isn’t because someone woke up that morning and decided to make renting a car confusing. It’s because the industry grew in layers.

A rental company may sit behind a wholesaler, broker, travel agent, online travel agency, affiliate, technology platform or payment provider. Sometimes several of those are involved in the same reservation. Each layer exists for an important reason, but every additional layer creates another opportunity for information to become simplified, translated, buried or misunderstood.

Somewhere along the way, the customer can lose sight of something pretty basic: what am I actually buying?

A vehicle category doesn’t always mean quite what you think it means. The car in the photograph may not be the car you receive. The cheapest rate may not produce the cheapest trip. Fuel policies matter, deposits matter, insurance matters, mileage matters, local fees matter, and what happens at the counter matters.

For many travelers, the rental counter is also one of their first real interactions after arriving somewhere new. That conversation can set the tone for the rental, and sometimes even for the beginning of the trip. Technology is changing that experience, and more of the process will continue to move toward automation, but the handoff between what was booked and what happens at pickup still matters enormously.

Often, the important information is technically available. It just isn’t particularly easy to understand. And that distinction matters.

I don’t think the biggest problem in car rental is deception. I think it’s fog: too much information sitting in too many places, described in too many different ways, sometimes by too many different people.

And fog has a cost. Sometimes it’s money, sometimes it’s time. And sometimes it’s simply a family standing at a rental counter after an overnight flight trying to understand why the reservation they thought they made isn’t quite the reservation in front of them.

That’s a large part of why I started Nifti Mobility Group.

After spending decades inside the business, I wanted to take that experience and look at the industry from a slightly different angle. How do we make the information clearer? How do we use better technology? How do we take data that already exists and make it more useful? How do we answer questions travelers routinely have before they become problems at the counter?

I’m not interested in standing outside the industry throwing rocks at it. I like this business. I’ve spent most of my working life in it, and I also think it can be better. Those two things can be true at the same time.

Nifti is where I’m exploring that. Through research, consulting, technology, data and a few exciting things we’re building ourselves, the goal is pretty simple: make car rental easier to understand and easier to navigate.

Think of this newsletter as the front porch.

Every week, I’ll bring you something from inside the business. If you’re a traveler, I want you to understand car rental well enough to make better decisions and avoid expensive surprises. If you work in the industry — rental company, broker, travel agent, technology provider or somewhere else in the chain — I want this to be an interesting and candid look at the business we all work in.

Some of it will be serious and some of it will be technical. And sometimes, regardless of where you are in the car rental “chain”, I’ll tell you something you don’t already know, trust me. And occasionally we should be allowed to laugh at ourselves, because after thirty years in car rental, I can assure you there’s material.

Here’s the larger point I believe in: making car rental clearer isn’t bad for the industry at all. It’s good for it.

A traveler who understands what they booked is more likely to be a happy customer. An agent with better information has fewer problems to solve. A rental company dealing with properly informed customers has fewer arguments at the counter. Clarity isn’t the enemy of margin. Done properly, it builds trust.

And I think trust is going to matter more, not less, in the next version of this business.

That’s the introduction.

Next time, we’ll get more specific.

For now, this newsletter is free, and there’ll always be plenty here for anyone who simply wants to understand the business a little better.

If something in this issue made you think of someone, send it to them — a traveler, a travel agent, someone in car rental, or that one person who somehow ends up with a rental-car story every single time they go on vacation.

And hit reply. Tell me who you are, what part of the industry you’re in — if any — and what you’ve always wondered about renting a car. If there’s something you want to share, discuss or even challenge me on, I’m interested in that too.

After nearly three decades in this business, I still learn something from the people in it all the time. I don’t expect that to stop.

Thanks for your interest & see what we're building at niftimobility.com.

— Brett