Rental car companies: look in your rear view mirror. Ride sharing services like Uber and Lyft are gaining on you.
“Ride sharing, having already overtaken cabs, is catching up to rental cars,” says Kevin Wolf, spokesperson for business expense management firm Certify, based on data from July through September of 2015.
In fact, he says, ride sharing has “actually has surpassed [rental cars] already in Boston and San Francisco.”
Certify's SmartSpend report finds that consumers prefer ride shares to rental cars and taxis by a significant margin. (Graphic: Certify)
Certify’s SmartSpend report finds that consumers prefer ride shares to rental cars and taxis by a significant margin. (Graphic: Certify)
“Business travelers now prefer ride sharing services to taxis across the U.S.,” reads Certify’s sharing economy report for the third quarter of 2015. “Trends also reveal how ride sharing providers like Uber and Lyft are beginning to gain ground on rental cars.”
“Over the past 7 quarters, ride sharing has steadily increased as a percentage of overall ground transportation, while taxi and rental car [sic] have declined,” the report says. In San Francisco, Certify found that some 82 percent of hired car rides by its customers were in ride shares, versus a mere 12 percent for rental cars and a minuscule 6 percent for taxis. In Boston, the difference was 45 percent for ride shares versus 23 percent for rental cars, though taxis maintained a higher market share of 32 percent.
Certify says that satisfaction with ride shares far surpasses that of car rentals and taxis (see graphic above). Among the reasons: relative costs of the rides themselves; not having to pay for parking (which big city hotels can easily cost $35 per night or more, while ride share fares might be a fraction of that); time savings of not having to get to and from rental car facilities and parking garages; and not having to gas up rental cars before returning them.

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Certify calls San Francisco and Boston “bellweather cities,” noting that other markets seem on track for similar results. Compared to taxis, ride sharing has a 71 percent market share in Dallas, 60 percent in Los Angeles and 59 percent in Atlanta.
Wolf says that some of Certify’s biggest customers include H&R Block, Pitney Bowes, Subway Sandwiches, Little Caesars Pizza and Dr. Martens shoes.