apex car rentals and anz

The less than happy experiences expressed by tourists hiring cars for their New Zealand travels prompted Phil Lennon to take a hard look at the market.

apex rental cars

What he found encouraged him to buy a few imported Japanese used cars to launch Apex Rental Cars.

Seven years later the business is now the largest New Zealand owned player with a fleet of 4000 cars with 16 branches from Auckland to Queenstown.

From the beginning Apex has looked at all aspects of the business from the customers’ perspective.

“Apex was the first in the country to introduce a complete end to end online facility that made booking easy. We are now the first with an iPhone application. Through a computer or an iPhone customers can make a complete booking in less than a minute,” says Managing Director Phil Lennon.

The ease of doing business and the name, plus a little IT know-how, makes Apex prominent when search engines retrieve rental car options and has double the car fleet in the last three years.

“When we began we tried to take a different approach to our competitors. We built the business to provide a simple, easy transaction that our customers want. We believe that it shouldn’t be hard to rent a car when you need one,” Phil Lennon says.

It is the same philosophy Apex has had with ANZ since it started in business.

“Apex has been a very inclusive client. They come to us with a well prepared business case and a thoroughly thought out strategy” says ANZ Relationship Manager Chris Broughton.

“As Apex has grown over the years we have been able to move the relationship up through ANZ to reflect the greater complexity, supporting management with increased specialist skills.”

ANZ now provides services including foreign exchange, interest rate risk management, specialised lending and has assisted Apex to evaluate a range of capital structures to achieve its ambitions.

And those ambitions have remained on track almost unchecked by the global financial crisis, the downturn in the domestic economy and a significant realignment of exchange rates that have made a holiday downunder more expensive for Europeans, Japanese and North Americans.

“The exchange rate has encouraged many tourists to look around for better value and that has helped us,” Phil Lennon says.

While many other businesses have been weathering the financial storm by downsizing or slowing fleet replacement, Apex took the opportunity to acquire a smaller competitor and has opened new offices in Queenstown, Wellington and most recently at Auckland airport. It has also given its logo and corporate livery a distinctly New Zealand feel to provide a further point of differentiation from the internationally recognised brands.

The business has also evolved to serve the domestic demand with its preference for new vehicles. The market split is now approximately even and is reflected in the composition of the fleet. Innovation has been a constant driver. From being one of the leaders in on-line bookings and now with an iPhone application, its in-house IT team is constantly reviewing trends for further opportunities to provide value for customers.

“We are not sure about the value of social networks for renting cars but if the networks do move in a way that furthers that opportunity we will look at ways we can use them.”

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