Budget Rent-a-car recently went from all-corporate to a franchise model, which has interesting side effects for one-way travelers like myself. For starters, you pay for your car at the end of your trip--so the destination rental franchise gets the $$$ and the source franchise gets bubkis. Furthermore, they are basically giving away one of their cars to the destination franchise. For smaller outfits like the Los Alamos franchise, this is a significant issue, as not too many people travel one-way to Los Alamos.

The end result of all of this is that a given franchise will try to give you their worst vehicle for any one-way trip you take. Los Alamos sources so little one-way travel that they only had one beater earmarked for one-way giveaways when I arrived this morning. It was a not-entirely-new Chevy Cavalier with some minor body damage and about 30k miles. I'm sure they were excited by the prospect of sticking me with this thing.

Luckily for me, it turns out its registration had just expired and they couldn't release it for travel. So they were scrambling through their available cars to find the one with the most miles. Their options were to rent me some full-size car for the price of a compact, or to give me a relatively new Impala. They went with the Impala, which is currently the workhorse of their mid-sized fleet.

I estimate that losing this car to the Hartford, CT, franchise represents a reduction-in-force of about 20% of their available mid-sized vehicles. Ouch. And odds are no one will be one-waying a mid-sized car into Los Alamos any time soon, so they'll probably have to buy a new car to replace it.

nyuk nyuk