Location Codes for Car Rental and Car Sharing

Renting a car is a series of handovers at specific places: where the customer picks it up, where it is returned, where an out-of-hours key drop sits. Each has a failure mode that feels small to the operator and large to the customer who has a flight to catch.

Pickup that is hard to find

Rental desks are often not where the cars are. Airport companies run shuttles to off-site depots, city locations share multistorey car parks, and car-sharing vehicles are scattered across streets and bays. The customer's booking says "Level 3, bay 14", which assumes they can reach the car park in the first place.

What the operator can name

• Depot entrance and, separately, customer car park for the pickup lot.
• Shuttle stop where the courtesy bus collects arrivals.
• After-hours return drop, which is often on a different side of the building.
• Fixed car-sharing bays, one code per bay or per group of bays.
• Delivery locations, where the operator brings the car to the customer's door and the customer chooses the spot.

Using it in the booking

A confirmation that includes the code for the right point, and a short line such as "ground floor, east side", is more useful than a street address. For delivery services, ask the customer to place a pin at their preferred spot and store it with the booking so the driver sees it.

Practical limits

Because a cell is 3 m by 3 m, it will not tell a customer which bay in a car park is theirs; the bay number in your own system does that. Multi-level car parks need an extra instruction, since a code has no height. Customers outside the supported countries cannot get a code, so keep conventional directions for them.

Operators should avoid publishing the precise pin of a home delivery or a private parking space beyond the staff who need it.

For related uses read parking and EV charging and vehicle recovery. Rental companies that run a booking website can use the embeddable map described in the documentation.

Test it as a customer would

Test the instructions the way a customer would: stand at the arrivals hall with only the confirmation message and see whether you can reach the car. Fix whatever wording confuses you before sending it to anyone else.