There will always be a risk of theft, no matter where it’s being rented from. Simply being an out-of-towner doesn’t make a person more likely to steal a car, however the fact that they have flown into the airport where they are renting from makes them much more likely to return the car since they will presumably be flying back out.

The main reason local branches won’t rent to out-of-towners (theoretically speaking, because as I said earlier, they often do anyway) is because they are much much harder to track down without proof of a local address.

Anyway, all this is just a long way of saying that one branch doesn’t inherit more risk by choosing to rent to either local or out-of-town renters, however the level of risk in renting to these groups of people depends on where they rent from. Hope that made a little more sense.

I ‘m still confused.

Company X will rent to both local and out of town renters. But it will only rent to out of town renters at the airport location, and local renters at the local location. Ok. I get that. What I don’t get is how risk of theft can be an issue since Company X will rent to both local and out of town folks, just through different distribution channels.

For example, if out of town renters provide a greater risk, then why is the airport location willing to accept that risk, but local locations won’t.

As for the one-way rentals, they’re concerned about cars never being returned (theft), not cars being returned to other branches.

I thought that the big thing is that they ask for a drivers license and credit card. Once they have that, tracking down someone who doesn’t return the car shouldn’t be a big deal. Besides that, don’t most rental cars these days come with GPS devices and maybe something similar to Lo-Jack? If they’re really that worried about a car not being returned, then why do one-way rentals?

I must be missing something. If the local branches fear theft and will only rent to locals, why doesn’t the airport location have the same fear?

Something like Hertz Location Edition is clearly off airport. I’ve ended up using them when my car was being repaired for an extended period.

On my last trip to Hawaii we ended up renting three cars on three islands. In Honolulu we actually got a $14/day special weekend rate from Alamo. The location was well off the airport and we could clearly see several other rental car lots. Of course we took the shuttle, although I’m not sure if their license to operate the airport shuttle also meant they had to charge an airport tax. In Kahalui (Maui) and Hilo the rental lots were clearly on the airport site. At Hilo I think we even walked right from the baggage claim to the rental lot. I don’t know if it should have been a surprise, but we paid a lot more to rent at the airport locations.

More than once I’ve seen local residents try to rent cars from the airport locations when they do not have flights, and they are denied rentals. Often, the airport locations will only rent to you if you can show an outbound flight in the near future. I assume this is to guarantee that you have some financial incentive other than the car rental to return to the airport.