Half a century of experience
Read more about our brand story
It's not about cheap cars, it's about a sophisticated system behind the scenes, backed by decades of work.
Payless Car Rental is still relatively hot on the Slovak market, but it's backed by nearly half a century of brand building and service enhancement. Read more about the story of Payless Car Rental, a brand that also in Slovakia offers rentals of luxuriously equipped cars at prices that are hardly rivalled by other car rental companies.
Payless Car Rental was launched in Slovakia in June 2018, with the brand's intention to enter our market even earlier. The brand in our country belongs to the United Group with a 24-year history, and as such is part of one of the largest international mobility and car rental companies called Avis Budget Group. And this international experience of Payless Car Rental is significantly longer.
The brand entered the Slovakian market with high ambitions, thus representing the entire international corporate strategy.
It all started in Washington, D.C.
Today, the company's headquarters are located in St. Petersburg, Florida, but the company's very origins are tied to another American city, Spokane, Washington.
The company was founded by John Les Netterstron in 1971. Even without slogans, the company name itself, Payless Car Rental, was meant to draw attention to the affordability of car rentals. Even then, there was already strong competition in the car rental market, mainly AVIS, whose history dates back to 1946, and Budget Rent a Car with over 60 years of tradition. Apart from them, other smaller or larger car rental companies tried to compete for the attention of customers, among which it was necessary to stand out. Putting the phrase "pay less" directly into the name proved to be a step in the right direction.
Payless Car Rental had forged a path as one of the most affordable rentals in the United States throughout the 1970s and 1980s, achieving low prices primarily through drastic cost optimization. Unlike many other car rental companies, Payless Car Rental did not operate branches directly at airports, but near them, which significantly reduced the cost of parking unused vehicles. Customers were comfortable with this anyway, as they saved considerable money for the few minutes sacrificed on the way from the airport to the rental company. In the United States, the price category of Payless Car Rental is also called the "deep-value segment".
The number of car rental branches under Netterstron's leadership grew and by 1987 reached the magic mark of one hundred branches. By the same year, the company was doing well enough to buy another large company, the U.S. division of the Canadian company Holiday Rent a Car. Its acquisition gave Payless Car Rental a major innovation that literally changed the entire car rental market - a centralized reservation system.
In the years that followed, the company boomed, gradually building up more than 167 locations, but not only in the United States, but also in South America and Europe. The new branches are established as franchises, where they take over not only the visual identity of the company, but also its know-how and vehicle care methodology. And today there are more than ten thousand of them.
Payless Car Rental in Slovakia
The Payless Car Rental brand currently has two branches in Slovakia in Bratislava, and is actively working on creating a branch network across the country.
The range of vehicles is divided into 4 basic categories - Economy, Compact, 9-seater and Van-N2. The Economy category offers smaller vehicles, more suitable for the city and short journeys, such as the Renault Clio from €13 excluding VAT per day for rentals of eight days or more. Compact offers both larger and more comfortable vehicles. You can take the Renault Trafic from the 9-seater category for trips with the gang, or move your furniture with the Renault Master van from the VAN N2 category.
In the fleet, you will only find vehicles with above-standard equipment. The equipment includes cruise control, navigation, air conditioning and, in the case of the Compact Automatic category, an automatic transmission.
All engines are fuel-efficient and meet the public commitment that Slovak Payless Car Rental made last year: to actively reduce the fleet carbon dioxide emissions of its vehicles. The aim is to achieve the prescribed European target of a fleet average of 95 g/km of CO2, which, although it does not apply to car rental companies, Payless Car Rental is nevertheless committed to as a member of the "United Group"