When you travel, if you do not do that with your own car, you can choose among many public and private means of transport. If you are travelling on a budget you need to use above all public means of transport, trains, buses and underground, while if you can spend a little more money, and especially if you need to be always in time and as precise as possible, you can take a taxi, although the best thing to do is renting a car. However, car rental, a service which can be found all over Italy, is suffering the consequences of the world crisis that has affected many other sectors.
The data regarding the matriculations occurred in 2009 show that there has been a considerable decrease in comparison to 2008: the Fleet & Mobility Study Center claimed that there has been a 25% decrease in the first three months of 2009, while in 2008 there had been good results, with an increase in the number of matriculations. The purchase and matriculation of new cars might have come to a standstill also as a consequence of the crisis that the sector of travel and tourism is going through: as the number of travel reservations, both for business and for leisure, decreased, car rental companies tried to limit the damage of their own sector and, predicting a drop in demand, both by tourists and by companies, did not expand their fleet, or if they did, they reduced the number of new matriculations in comparison to the past. This does not mean that the number of cars of each company has decreased, but that they went on using older cars, which had already been matriculated: usually the estimated “life” of a car is 8-10 months, but recently it has gone beyond 12 months, and this is what happened in all Italian cities, from Rome to Milan. In fact the expectations about the sector of travel and tourism turned out to be even too pessimistic, and we cannot claim that there has been that drop in demand that had persuaded car rental companies to stop matriculations, but this did not change things, as new cars had not been ordered: as a consequence car rental companies could only use the cars that were already part of their fleet.
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If Italy has suffered from a decrease in the number of new matriculations, we cannot claim that many other countries have had better results: in the States, just to make an example, General Motors received far fewer requests for matriculations by car rental companies, resulting in the lowest level since 1975.
In the second half of 2009 there have been more reassuring data, with a demand in car hire more similar to that of 2008, and an evidence of this is given by the fact that rental car companies were even able to choose their own costumers: the new trend is preferring those tourists that can afford to spend quite large sums of money to companies, that usually pay less.
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This article was written by Francesca Tessarollo with support from taxi Linate. For more information, please visit convenzioni taxi or taxi Torino.
