Mike Segar/Reuters Zipcar, which often rents to people who are under 21, includes Mini Coopers in its fleet.

For those of us who like picking up a Zipcar for a few hours without having to talk to anyone and dislike waiting for the rental car bus or in line, Avis Budget Group’s acquisition of Zipcar is cause for a bit of fear. However the synergies end up benefiting both companies, you have to wonder whether some of them will degrade Zipcar’s service or policies.

Take the age-old rental-car age discrimination issue for instance, which I’ve been complaining about since 1995.

Zipcar manages to find a way to rent to anybody with a decent driving record who is 21 or older and has been driving for at least a year. On many campuses where the company has teamed up with a university, you only have to be 18. There is no surcharge; the company simply includes whatever higher insurance premium it must pay to rent to younger drivers in its hourly or daily rates. (That said, drivers under 21 have less liability coverage, and Zipcar still doesn’t give them — or any of its customers — the ability to buy more. Maybe Avis Budget can fix that.)

Avis, however, rents to young people only if a state forces it to, as New York did in resolving a discrimination suit that ended in 1997. Avis’s response was to impose a surcharge on anyone 18 to 21 years old. It’s currently $52 a day. If you’re 21 to 24, you pay $35 a day extra in the state.

In most other states, Avis bars people under 21 and welcomes the 21- to 24-year-old set with open arms — while charging an extra $28 a day, according to its Web site. (I’d link to it, but the site is antiquated enough that the information isn’t on a page where a link will work.)

Avis makes some exceptions for government employees and members of the military, probably because it would be imprudent to discriminate against them and perhaps also because they spend a lot of money. Oh, and those 21- to 24-year-olds can’t rent minivans, passenger vans or full-size S.U.V.’s, among other vehicles.

I asked Avis Budget whether its policies might change after the merger, but I did not get any replies to my e-mail inquiries. Here’s hoping it doesn’t declare one day that nobody under 25 can use a Zipcar without paying high fees.

As for Zipcar, I asked whether its good influence might help the cause of the under-25 crowd at airports or other Avis Budget locations. Alas, a spokeswoman, Colleen McCormick, wasn’t biting. “Until the acquisition is complete we’re really not able to speculate on what might or might not change with either of the two companies involved,” she said in an e-mail message. John Barrows, an Avis Budget spokesman, sent me a similar note.

What would you like Avis Budget to learn from Zipcar? And what, if anything, could Zipcar learn from Avis Budget?

Article source: http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/03/zipcar-avis-and-age-discrimination-against-renters/?partner=rss&emc=rss