Rental Car Crunch at LAX Hits Seasonal Surge of Visitors

Rental cars may be in short supply at Los Angeles International Airport for the next few weeks, so last-minute visitors better forget any plans to dash through LAX and leap right behind the wheel.

Conventioneers have been pouring into Los Angeles by the thousands, and airport rental car outlets say they are running short of vehicles, with many companies expecting to cut off reservations altogether on peak days through October.

All of the major national rent-a-car chains--Hertz, Dollar, National, Avis, Budget and Thrifty--reported an influx of business customers in their LAX agencies that began last Sunday.

Major rental agencies say that walk-up customers are not likely to find cars available for several weeks and that reservations need to be placed at least three days to a week in advance. Reservations agents at the other agencies also anticipate reservation “blackouts” periodically for the next few weeks.

Fall is normally a difficult time for rental car outlets because they have fewer cars available as they sell off old cars and await the new models. But agents say this year is worse.

The crunch is affecting corporate travelers accustomed to the spontaneity of an unplanned trip to Los Angeles for just a day or two of business.

“We’ve had a phenomenal number of conventions coming in, and on Monday and Tuesday we were not taking any additional reservations,” said Brenda Rigby, a spokeswoman for Hertz Rent-a-Car, which has one of the largest rental fleets in Southern California. “We have had to turn away a lot of walk-up traffic--customers who don’t make plans far in advance and are used to getting a car and getting it fast.”

Car agents attribute the shortages to several large conventions, including the Men’s Apparel Guild Convention, which attracted an estimated 40,000 exhibitors and visitors to the Los Angeles Convention Center earlier this week.

“This is the busiest time for us, in September through mid-October, as everyone tries to squeeze in their convention after summer vacations and before the holiday season,” said Susan Cox of the Greater Los Angeles Visitors and Convention Bureau. Cox said hotel bookings were also near capacity but not close to the rental car problem.

Thousands of conventioneers are expected to arrive at dozens of gatherings in future weeks, ranging from the 10,000-member Water Pollution Control Federation meeting beginning Oct. 5 to 500 attendees at the Western Museum Conference ending today.

“During peak convention time, you could never have enough cars to take care of every person who wants one,” said George Pamper, Southern California fleet manager for National Rent-a-Car.

In order to match the demand, rental agencies would have to purchase extra 1986 car models just as they were being phased out of production and be forced to sell hundreds of used cars in November, when the market for them is low, Pamper said. National averages 5,000 cars on the lot at its LAX agency, over half of its total Southern California fleet.

Pamper said this year’s convention crunch is worse than the same period in 1985 but “not extraordinary. We’ve had no sudden surge, just lots and lots of business.”

Of the more than 35 car rental outlets in the LAX vicinity, cars seem to be available without reservations mainly at some of the smaller agencies, where managers reported that they also have been running low.

“Someone walks up to Budget and gets turned away, so they go to Avis and then on down the line until they give up. Finally they end up at one of the lots outside the airport boundaries,” said Mike Reidy, manager of Executive Rent-a-Car, which had four cars available at its Century Boulevard office on Wednesday.

“It’s pretty bad this year. Worse than Thanksgiving. Worse than Christmas,” said Dony Green, a reservations agent for Thrifty Rent-a-Car, which rents 100 cars a day out of LAX. “We are completely booked up until tomorrow. And tomorrow, we’ll be booked until the next day.”