SOFIA (Bulgaria), September 17 (SeeNews) – The revenue of Bulgaria's Top Rent A Car is steadily increasing and the company intends to keep it growing on the back of rising passenger traffic at the country's airports, a senior company official told SeeNews.
“Every year, we generate growth of 30%-40% in terms of the number of cars, workforce and revenue and we are working to keep up the positive trend,” Milen Marinov, CEO of Top Rent A Car, said in an interview with SeeNews last week.
Established in 2003, Top Rent A Car is Bulgaria's largest national car rental company operating a fleet of over 1200 new vehicles from leading manufacturers. It has rental offices at Bulgaria's international airports in Sofia, Varna and Burgas, as well as at the resorts of Golden Sands, Sunny Beach, Obzor and Balchik on the Black Sea coast.
The company is part of the aircraft-airport-hotel-rent-a-car chain, Marinov said.
“Our business is directly connected to the passenger traffic of Bulgarian airports and its increase instantly translates into growth of our operations.”
The interest of low-cost airlines towards Southeast Europe has been increasing significantly in recent years. The passenger traffic of Hungary's Wizz Air to and from Bulgaria grew by record 47% to 2.5 million last year. Wizz Air is offering 3.3 million seats in 2018, up 27%, with the company servicing 44 routes to and from the airports in Sofia, Burgas and Varna.
In July, Bulgaria opened a tender for awarding a 35-year concession contract for the operation of Sofia International Airport, which serviced 6.49 million passengers in 2017, up 30.3%.
“As a result, the rent-a-car sector in Bulgaria expands between 10% and 15% per year,” Marinov noted.
However, the sector faces some problems that can hamper its growth. According to Marinov, the registration of vehicles in Bulgaria is too slow, while the processing of electronic fines of traffic offenders is a mess.
“The recently made legislative changes linked to the immobilising of vehicles used by drunk driving offenders, for which rent-a-car companies do not have any fault, is also a problem,” Marinov explained.
Under changes to the road traffic law adopted by Bulgaria’s parliament in 2017, cars driven by drunk-driving offenders are immobilised for a month if the perpetrator is not the owner of the vehicle.
The rent-a-car companies have a lot of vehicles immobilised for one or six months, which represents a blow to the business, Marinov said.
“We do not have any fault for leasing out a car to an unconscientious customer who decides to drink alcohol and then drive a car.”
($ = 0.859788 euro)