Priceline is wasting little time making the most of its recent acquisition, online car hire firm TravelJigsaw, transferring control from current partners to the new system.

Priceline will not disclose how many existing partnerships it has with car rental technology and aggregation firms around the world for any of its brands.

But in the UK, for example, Priceline’s car hire engine is currently run by Ireland-based technology firm CarTrawler.

This is one of many relationships due to end shortly, an official says, “just a matter of work prioritisation” for the company’s tech teams.

At the time of the acquisition in May 2010, TravelJigsaw said its management had retained a minority stake in the company and would stay on to manage the next stage.

Many suggest the deal for the online and over-the-phone car rental service was made to provide a stablemate for Priceline hotel websites Booking.com and Agoda as they focus on growth in the European and Asia-Pacific markets.

TravelJigsaw offers customer support in 20 languages, and international customers can rent cars that are familiar to them in local markets through the company’s almost two dozen branded websites.

Ironically, current provider to the UK version of Priceline, CarTrawler, was one of the other companies spoken of as an alternative acquisition target by the online travel agency ahead of the deal two months ago.

Even car manufacturers are eager to explore the possibilities of marrying travel with advanced technology -- and German giant Audi is no exception as a project known as Travolution demonstrates.

The car company has launched a system whereby vehicles can communicate with traffic control signals and calculate what speed a vehicle should drive in order to miss a red light or hopefully pass through a green light.

The idea is to make cars more fuel efficient (braking, changing gear puts subtle pressure on engines) by reducing fuel consumption.

The system also can assist with the overall cruise control in the vehicle by working out distances and frequency of light changes ahead on the road.

Another idea Audi has for the future is to use the same technology to communicate with payment systems at self-serve fuel stations.

The company reckons that if the technology was applied throughout Germany, exhaust emissions could be lowered by around two million tonnes of CO2 a year -- that’s the equivalent to a reduction of approximately 15 percent in CO2 from motor vehicles in urban traffic.

If the technology becomes a regular feature of cars across the market, including car rental vehicles, perhaps tourism-related functionality could be included, such as flight information, check-in facilities and the like.

Here’s a demo of the Travolution car in action.

NB: Writer was editor of a UK-based travel B2B media brand also known as Travolution until August 2009.

If a formula combining the number of fans and posts on Facebook with number of followers and tweets on Twitter is a reliable method of tracking popularity, then Avis is doing a good job.

Greenlight Search has investigated the leading car rental companies in the UK to establish the first popularity index based on four factors: use and frequency of both Twitter and Facebook.

Of the top 15 brands included in the survey, all but NationalCar, EasyCar, Enterprise and Suncar had a following on Twitter, for example, compared with just five that have fans on Facebook.

The index is as follows:

1. Avis
2. Travelsupermarket
3. Streetcar
4. Auto-Europe
5. Hertz
6. Carrentals
7. CarHire3000
8. Budget
9. Europcar
10. HolidayAutos
11. Atlaschoice
12. NationalCar
13. EasyCar
14. Enterprise
15. Suncar

Greenlight says:

“Auto-Europe was the most actrive brand in social media, producing a total of seven p[oists and 188 tweets in April. It also had the most integrated following, with 53 Facebook fans and 344 Twitter followers. By contrast, Budget, which had 118 followers on Twitter, did not generate a single tweet in April, and therefore missed out on potential interaction with social media consumers.”

NB: Full details of the Car Hire report from Greenlight.

Perhaps an obvious way to develop the survey will be to measure not only the number of tweets or posts by a company but if the messages are one-way or in response to questions for consumers (@replies, for example).

Ireland-based European site Argus Car Hire is gearing up for a major relaunch of its website this week, timed wonderfully to coincide with a resurgence of sorts in car rental.

Although the sector was hit hard by the economic downturn, as the supply of fleet cars from manufacturers dried up, last week’s acquisition of TravelJigsaw by Priceline indicated to some that car rental is now an area of the industry to watch.

This week sees another significant player in Europe, Argus, begin to roll out a string of new features to its site including significant personalisation and mapping functionality perhaps more akin to a trip planning website.

This latest move follows the widely praised work carried out Europcar last year in conjunction with web agency Fortune Cookie to throw the Microsoft Silverlight magic to its website – and, in turn, Surface functionality onto offline tables.

The ramping up of user experience on car rental sites indicates that the car search and buying process is changing and significant effort is being made to improve how users interact with such brands.

Argus is the consumer-facing business of car hire travel technology company CarTrawler, a major player behind the scenes powering a number of major online travel agency portals and airline sites.

Some are now pondering what is the valuation of Cartrawler/Argus and the company is now looking like a big acquisition target for others in the online travel agency space.

The other significant online player in Europe, HolidayAutos, remains for the time being still under Lastminute.com ownership despite widely rumoured to be up for sale in the summer of 2009.

It was only a matter of time before the floodgates opened following Facebook’s social graph treatise last week – and the Like button is gaining momentum in travel.

Shortly behind TripAdvisor’s integration of the Like button on hotel and other content pages comes USRentaCar, which promises users this week that it is the first car hire to follow suit.

Like buttons are now featured on every search result for any vehicle or any location, through multiple suppliers.

The idea is that over time users will learn to trust certain products or brands or content on sites if those in their social graph (in this case: their friends on Facebook) recommend it.

The company says:

“The idea that customers can see the vehicles and suppliers their friends have used and liked appealed to us. Our own supplier reviews have been a great success and we see the Facebook like button as an add on to this service.”

Meanwhile, TripAdvisor says it temporarily removed the Like button from the website earlier this to receive a “site performance-related patch”.

Car rental firms in Europe are counting the cost of the recent volcanic ash disruption as news emerges that the sector lost Euro 65 million over the six-day crisis.

Dublin-based car rental distribution firm Cartrawler says around 22% of bookings were cancelled as flights were hit when air space were shut down systematically across the continent.

A eye-watering 95% of cars were not collected at airports impacted by the crisis.

Some estimates suggest around 10 million air passengers were affected during the shutdown and the cost to airlines is currently put at around $1.7 billion.

The aftermath of the shutdown has affected the car rental sector in a similar way to the airlines and passengers – many cars were hired on one-way bookings by stranded passengers and are now scattered across the continent, CarTrawler says.

Around 10% of the entire car rental fleet is estimated to be located outside of its home country.

Car rental appears to be in vogue as the place to try advanced planning tools as French giant National-Citer shows off its deal with YourTour.

YourTour, a division of Belgian travel technology company Decizium, has modified its trip planning product so visitors to National-Citer site can plot routes and plan itineraries before hiring a vehicle.

A microsite within Citer.fr allows users to set start and end dates, regions and if a tour should be a linear route between two points or circular.

YourTour then calculates and suggests a route for the period selected, including places to stay, prices, and things to do along the way.

The system is helped by having the involvement of two heavyweights to supply hotel inventory and editorial content in the form of Booking.com and Lonely Planet.

Officials say the existing YourTour system – which is currently limited to France – will be extended in the coming weeks to include Spain, Andorra and Florida.

Another B2B deal is also due shortly to go live for an application on California.

The National-Citer deal follows the Europcar project being developed by UK web design firm Fortune Cookie. The agency has thrown its weight behind a Microsoft Silverlight and Surface-led project to overhaul the Europcar web and offline experience.

Like most travelers, when I book a trip in North America (and this generally applies to Australia and New Zealand, South America, South Africa and a few other regions) I take out my credit card.

First I book my flight (entirely pre-paid), then my hotel (guaranteed with my credit card and subject to cancellation time and no-show fee).

Then I put my credit card away and book my post-paid car rental.

And I’ve always wondered about that. Why do car rental companies make it so easy for me to stiff them?

How do they manage their staff and inventory (fleet) if they don’t know how many reservations are going to turn into bookings, if they don’t know how many cars need to be at a given location?

In the US, car rental companies have been asking themselves these same questions for the last ten to fifteen years because the financial implications are hard to ignore:

• 10-30% of all post-paid reservations are no-shows, based on channel booked (direct to supplier has a lower no-show rate, large travel portals have much higher rates)
• As a result, car rental companies, especially in high-demand markets, routinely overbook, risking a complete inventory sell-out, leading to additional cost of renting cars from competitors and engendering the ill-will of customers
• Car rental companies are sometimes forced to upgrade customers at no charge due to sold-out classes, a lost opportunity to charge for that upgraded vehicle
• Car rentals are perishable inventory units; every day a car doesn’t get booked is a day of lost revenue that can never be realized

Now at least the industry talking about it publicly.

Last fall, Avis Budget started talking to the GDSs about no-show fees.

The American Car Rental Association (ACRA), a trade body for the car rental industry, posted an open letter supporting the initiative.

Avis Budget, along with several other rental car companies and distributors, is now leading a project team in OpenTravel to add no-show related data elements to its standard XML messages.

At the Car Rental Show in Las Vegas in April, ACRA will hold a meeting to discuss this issue with suppliers and distributors, and will hold a panel discussion on this topic during the conference.

But, as reasonable as it sounds, applying a cancellation policy and assessing no-show fees seems to be fraught with contention.

The beneficiaries of a no-show policy are obviously the rental car companies, but what if only some of them implement this policy?

Would consumer behavior change if some rental car companies charged a fee but others didn’t? And what about the intermediaries, like the big OTAs?

What if they decide not to honor the no-show policies of their rental car supplier partners by not collecting and sending credit card information to the suppliers?

The technology to support this policy is pretty straight forward, compared to the business challenges:

• Add a few fields to search, availability and book messages, and add a few fields to the databases.
• Modify the UI to display fees and terms, and collect a credit card number.

There is the not-so-small issue of full development calendars and allocation of scarce and expensive technology resources, but the actual work needed to be done is not cutting-edge.

It can be done. The hotel industry implemented no-show fees and policies in the 1970s, and while individual hotels can set their own policies (4pm or 6pm cancellation notification, one night or full-stay charge for no-show, suspension of fees based on weather or other conditions, etc), policies industry-wide are consistently implemented and experienced travelers are conditioned to give a credit card number and make sure they notify the hotel if they aren’t going to show up.

As a result, the hotel industry has a no-show rate in the low single digits and can be confident in their pricing and occupancy management practices, not to mention keeping their operations costs down.

Most of the European rental car market is pre-paid all or in part.

According to Bobby Healy, CTO of Dublin-based CarTrawler, a company that provides rental car inventory to suppliers and distributors around the world, when a consumer pays for the car rental makes a huge difference in how the consumer manages the transaction.

“Levels of no-show are almost zero when any amount of cash is taken upfront, but grows to about 20% when no commitment is made to the car rental company or intermediary.

“Often reconciliation between the supplier and the intermediary is difficult due to the black hole known as no-show and of course this makes car rental a less attractive revenue generator to intermediaries.”

Craig Parmerlee, director of business development for AceRentaCar, puts it like this:

“If we never collect a penny from a no-show fee, I would be happy. We want the no-show fee to change consumer behavior such that they cancel any reservations they don’t plan to use. Simple as that.”

The ongoing overhaul of the Europcar online presence has taken an interesting new turn with the launch of a platform for use on Microsoft Surface in airports.

The idea was first mooted in November 2009 but now the first table with fully functioning tools is set to be installed at Munich Airport in Germany shortly.

Europcar, which has developed the system with UK-based digital agency Fortune Cookie, will equip the system at a number of major outlets elsewhere around Europe from the end of the first half of 2010.

The platform allows users to browse images and route options and then plot a trip on a Bing-enabled map. The tool is obviously completely hand-driven on on the horizontal Surface system.

Once a user has created a trip they will be able to print out a personal planning pack from the Europcar outlet.

Europcar says it will also stream hotel offers through the system.

The system is not exclusive to the Microsoft Surface table – users will also be able to use the system on any touch-screen computer.

Europcar’s global marketing director Jehan de Thé says:

“This approach fits with Europcar’s determination to innovate and facilitate journey planning whilst making car rental a constantly more practical and pleasant experience for our customers.”

Toyota’s slew of recalls for allegedly defective accelerator pedals and floor mats is having an impact on Hotwire’s car business.

You see, it’s not just a consumer woe.

Expedia Inc. President and CEO Dara Khosrowshahi says the company’s Hotwire unit has been experiencing weakness in car rentals, and this was exacerbated by the Toyota recall.

Major car rental firms like Hertz, AvisBudget and Enterprise had already been reducing fleet sizes in 2009, but Khosrowshahi notes that the Toyota recall brought fleet sizes down further. Hertz reportedly has been most-affected by the Toyota recalls.

Smaller fleet sizes, Khosrowshahi says, help Hotwire’s pricing, but hurt volumes, and lead to a lower percentage of opaque sales.

Those opaque sales — where Hotwire customers know the rental price before booking but not the identity of the car rental company — are where Hotwire pulls in the big bucks.

Tnooz has reported that in September and October, fleet levels had declined to such an extent that Hotwire for the first time found itself sold out in some markets.

So, the massive Toyota recalls apparently haven’t helped.

One would have to assume that Priceline, too, must be feeling some pain from the Toyota recalls.

Other than its car rental business, Hotwire is peforming “very well,” Khosrowshahi says.

In fact, the room nights Hotwire sold increased more than 30% in the fourth quarter, he says.