In a move that should result in much greater availability of rental vans for both Europcar and National Van Rental customers, Europcar UK and National Car Rental are pooling their rental fleets, allowing customers of either brand to hire vans from both fleets.

The changes mean that from early March, Europcar and National will offer a combined rental van fleet of more than 6,000 vans from over 250 locations across the UK. The rental car fleets of the two companies have also been combined, resulting in a combined UK fleet of over 60,000 vehicles.

Europcar UK Group’s Fleet Director Tim Bailey stressed that “The importance of vehicle availability should not be underestimated in the current marketplace.”

Both the Europcar and National brands are owned in the UK by Europcar UK Group, so the rationalisation appears to make good business sense and should also offer noticeable benefits for customers, giving a wider choice of vehicles at all locations.

Airports are often busy, tiring places - especially at the end of a flight, when all you want to do is get on your way.

It looks like Europcar understand this and are doing their best to ease the pain. Europcar’s new Airside check-in system enables passengers travelling from Gatwick and Edinburgh into many of the UK’s major airports to have their rental car reservations processed automatically - before they arrive.

According to Europcar Operations Director David Alexander, “customers can check-in their car for rental before they board the plane, safe in the knowledge that the rental agreement will be pre-printed and the vehicle will be allocated before they even take off.”

All that remains to be done on arrival is to sign the rental agreement, pickup the keys and drive off. Sounds good to me.

Most rental websites (except this one!) require you to choose your dates, vehicle type and location at the beginning of the booking process - without allowing you to see the location’s exact address.

This can be a bit of a headache in larger towns and cities, as you can end up having to trek some distance across town to pick up your vehicle.

To help address this problem, we allow people to choose a location first and then see a list of van hire branches and their addresses before proceeding any further. We also provide popup maps for every hire branch in our database - so you can see exactly where it is.

Europcar4Vans have now also introduced a similar feature to their website - the location finder.

Simply choose a town name from the drop down list (rather like this site). You can then see full address details for the branch at that location and a map of its exact position (of course, with our system, you gain access to all this information for four rental companies - not just one!).

Take a look at the UK version of Europcar’s van rental location finder here.

Europcar is to roll out a thumbprint identification scheme to all of its 130 UK branches. Vehicle theft is a major problem for rental companies and the scheme is intended to discourage potential theives.

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Europcar are the first van hire company in the UK to allow you to rent vans by the hour. The service is available from all Europcars UK offices, for rental periods of up to 8 hours.

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It looks like Sixt and Europcar have been competing to see who can produce the most impressive-looking hire booth. Unfortunately for UK van renters these pictures were taken at Hamburg airport - but here’s hoping that these designs make their way to our shores in the future.

See here for a full set of images.

Original story here.