The Ins And Outs Of Thrifty Car Rental
Thrifty Car Rental is a unique company in that it allows itself to change its philosophy from time to time depending on the current business climate and also depending on what the company needs to accomplish to grow and succeed. Thrifty Car Rental is part of an organization that not only offers car rental services, but also runs car parking facilities and car sales locations. But the majority of their business conducted for the Thrifty Car Rental company is done in and around the airports of the world. For a while, branches were run by anyone with the desire, and the necessary cash investment required, to run one. For many years Thrifty Car Rental had adopted a business model that allowed other people to take part in their success, but that did not last for very long before the company decided that if you really want something done right you should probably do it yourself.
Thrifty Car Rental is also part of a much bigger group called Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group, which was started by the Chrysler Corporation and spun off as its own publicly owned entity. How Thrifty Car Rental got to that point and what it does not to maintain its end of the Dollar Thrifty group is an interesting story. It not only outlines a company that was built for success, but also a very smart company that is as able to recognize and capitalize on an opportunity now as it was back when it was started nearly 50 years ago.
Getting Thrifty
Thrifty Car Rental was founded in 1958 under the notion that everyone at the airport should be able to rent a car without spending a fortune. They also began the idea of offering long term parking services for airports as well which caught on very quickly. By 1987, Thrifty Car Rental went public and started offering stock for ownership in the company. They also had started their car sales division as well that was based on offering for sale their rental cars, but has since branched out into other areas of car and general automotive sales. Thrifty Car Rental also started offering franchise opportunities and soon found themselves expanding with the franchise business into airports that they had not touched before.
In 1989 Thrifty Car Rental was bought by Chrysler and the next year it was combined with the Dollar Rental Company to form the Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group. The Thrifty brand name was allowed to be kept and it has flourished ever since. In 2002, the company decided that it was going to start opening corporate owned locations along with still offering franchise opportunities and today the split between franchise and corporate owned locations is about 60% to 40% with the majority being franchises.
