Board level responsibility for CSR rests with the Chief Executive. In our corporately-owned operations, CSR management and monitoring is assigned to local management. For licensee countries, Regional Licensee Directors are responsible for promoting alignment with Group CSR principles and policies.
Environmental impacts
We remain committed to reducing, where possible, our negative impacts on the environment, of which by far the greatest are greenhouse gas emissions. Our European corporate operations and some of our licensees are CarbonNeutral® and we continue to introduce less polluting vehicles onto our fleet.
We measure our environmental impacts internally and our data is reviewed and analysed by the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management working with The CarbonNeutral Company.
In 2008 emissions from our corporately-owned operations amounted to 14,648 tCO2e.
Corporate operations
In 2008, our corporate operations focussed on developing and completing a series of initiatives to improve environmental performance, including:
- completing the integration of environmental reporting into financial reporting using a new finance system, which tracks utility use and business travel;
- undertaking a number of environmental audits of headquarters buildings and major rental locations in the Group’s main corporatelyowned markets;
- beginning the implementation of the resulting recommendations to achieve emissions reductions;
- making better use of resources and making all staff aware of what they can do to reduce energy use, including the use of e-learning to reduce travel;
- further increasing the use of videoconferencing between our Group headquarters in Bracknell and our other country corporate head offices with seven countries now participating, with a resulting reduction of over 25% in European travel; and
- developing closer links with customer groups to help reduce their environmental impact, including the launch of a bookable “green fleet” and a carbon offset tool for corporate customers.
We offset our emissions in 2008 in conjunction with The CarbonNeutral Company. Around 90% of total emissions were offset through renewable energy, independently credited to the Voluntary Carbon Standard: the remaining offset was via tree planting; since 2000, we have offset over 118,896 tonnes of CO2.
Fleet operations
We seek to minimise emissions from our fleet by introducing more environmentally friendly vehicles in more locations. In 2008 they have included:
- Ford flexi-fuel cars in France
- LPG fuelled Volkswagens in Italy
- BMW 1 series with stop-start technology in Spain, Germany, the UK and Belgium
- Honda Civic hybrids in Germany, Portugal and Holland
- Toyota Prius in the UK
As a result of these and other changes, a significant proportion of 2008 fleet purchases emitted below the European norm for CO2.
In Paris the OKIGO initiative, undertaken jointly with Vinci Park, allows customers who pay a subscription to have an Avis car available 24/7 in one of the many Vinci car parks. During 2008 OKIGO was expanded to 100 cars in 25 stations, mainly based in Paris, with a three-fold increase in the number of members to 1,500. Studies show that sharing a car in this way effectively replaces up to eight individual cars. We have also signed a partnership with Vinci Park, the Paris Metro and SNCF (leading French railway company) to facilitate the operation of a public car sharing scheme with 4,000 vehicles in Paris in 2010.
Avis Norway, Sweden and Spain maintained their eco ISO 14001 standards.
Community
We aim to make a positive contribution to the quality of life in the communities where we operate.
Our community investment guidelines provide that we focus on local environmental improvement and provision of free transport for community activities. In addition to this activity across our corporate and licensee network, we support UNICEF on a variety of projects. We also support initiatives which are particularly important to local staff.
Some of our 2008 projects have included:
- some of our 2008 projects have included:
- collecting food for Christmas on behalf of the NGO Caritas;
- fundraising for a cancer care charity in the UK;
- the renovation of a forest path in Hungary;
- the establishment of a partnership with Action Aid in Italy; and
- fundraising for the Portuguese Community against Aids (Portugal).
In addition, we support employee volunteering and fundraising:
- where staff commit to voluntary work for a charitable organisation in Barcelona, the Avis contact centre makes a quarterly contribution; and
- in our headquarters we match sponsorship funding for individual and team efforts.
Workplace
As challenging market conditions prevailed during 2008, we focussed on increasing the flexibility and effectiveness of our organisation and maintaining and managing employee motivation and engagement.
Having achieved much improved results in our employee satisfaction survey in 2007, we needed to ensure we built on these improvements even through the difficult economic conditions. Therefore, despite making management and structural changes in many areas of our business, we have focussed efforts on celebrating our successes, keeping our culture alive, increasing communication with employees, continued employee development and an established programme of community involvement.
The ‘We try harder.’ promise
We rely on our people to deliver the ‘We try harder.’ promise and appreciate that it is essential that we make Avis an enjoyable place to work where people can develop and grow.
We operate in many different countries and therefore have employees with very different cultural backgrounds. Accordingly we ensure that every employee understands what ‘We try harder.’ means and takes pride in working for Avis, regardless of their role.
We keep the spirit of ‘We try harder.’ alive through Company induction programmes and through our communications and training programmes. We have a number of employee recognition programmes that are widely used, encouraging employees to celebrate teamwork and enjoy time away from the workplace with their colleagues. For example, every country recognises its ‘Station of the year’ and individual employees recognise colleagues who have demonstrated great commitment or service through a scheme known as ‘Making a Difference’. Every year Germany hosts an extremely popular weekend football competition known as ‘We kick harder’ which is attended by people from other countries and centres.
Recognising and celebrating success is a key feature of our culture. We positively encourage our people to raise their ideas for improvements and innovations by participating in our new ideas scheme, called ‘Winning Ideas’. We also continue to recognise and value long service within the organisation and have a tradition of public celebration of major service milestones in all countries and centres. In Budapest we celebrated the 5th anniversary of the Business Support Centre, with special recognition for those employees who have been there since the centre’s opening.
Communicating with our people
In 2008 we have focussed on ensuring that all employees understand how the Group is performing, the impact of the external environment, and the role they play in delivering our success.
All countries and centres have delivered comprehensive communication strategies, including face-to-face time for all levels of employees with senior leaders and regular briefings on progress from their own managers.
At our 2008 Licensee conference we focussed strongly on the theme of communicating with employees and keeping people motivated during difficult times.
Developing our people
Our Human Resources vision is to enable people to grow within our company – developing both themselves and our organisation.
Each country and centre carries out comprehensive training programmes for both front-line and head-office based employees. Much operational training takes place within stations using real-life situations. To support this, some countries, including France and the UK, have developed a programme where certain station employees undertake special training to enable them to act as coaches to other employees.
During 2008 we developed a comprehensive European-wide training programme, utilising e-learning and classroom training for Rental Sales Agents, which ensures that every country can train people to the same high standards. Comprehensive training and development programmes are in place in both support centres for all levels of employee and these are regularly reviewed and refreshed.
Diversity
During 2008 we have continued to focus on developing a workforce which reflects the communities that we serve. In particular, we need to ensure our management structure reflects the international nature of our business, an aim which we have now achieved with the Avis Executive Board, which comprises five different nationalities. In our contact centre in Barcelona we employ some 30 nationalities. In our Group headquarters, we now have some 21 different nationalities working side by side.
Equal opportunities
We operate in many countries with diverse employment practices. Whilst respecting local circumstances, wherever we operate we follow the principles of equal opportunity in recruitment, development, remuneration and advancement.
Health and safety
We continued to focus on creating a robust health and safety culture across the Group, with each country and centre required to report quarterly on key statistics.
The majority of countries have increased training in this area and many countries have taken actions locally to further improve performance.
Marketplace
We aim to make Avis first choice for our customers by continually improving our service and so ensuring customer satisfaction and loyalty. This is especially important in an increasingly price competitive market environment. We have made further good progress this year, in particular ensuring that our customer service levels have not been impacted by the staff and cost reductions made in response to the weaker economic background.
We monitor customer satisfaction principally through customer surveys and the level of complaints and each country Managing Director takes personal responsibility for monitoring and improving customer satisfaction scores. Each month we distribute over 35,000 surveys and we receive over 6,000 replies. Of those returned, some 80% are received back in less than three days, enabling us to pass comments on to the relevant business area for appropriate action with minimal delay. In addition, Avis UK operates a ‘We try harder.’ blog, enabling customers to have an on-line dialogue with our marketing and customer service departments in the UK to continually review and improve the services we provide.
Our four key measures of customer satisfaction remain:
- overall satisfaction;
- willingness of customers to recommend Avis (Net Promoter Score™);
- customer complaints; and
- perception of station performance.
In 2008 we held “overall satisfaction levels” stable. This measure reflects customer satisfaction “overall with the rental experience”. The net promoter score, which measures the willingness to recommend Avis to a friend, improved again, by 1%. The percentage of customer invoices which were adjusted in 2008 continued to reduce. The station performance score, which records the overall efficiency of the running of a station, improved by a further 1% against last year, primarily driven by greater satisfaction with the car pick-up service, following the introduction of the “3-minute promise”.
We also focussed our efforts on building on the progress made in differentiating the brand and making the rental process faster, simpler and clearer for customers. During the year we increased further the number of people signing up to the Avis Preferred service, underlining the improving trend in customer satisfaction and loyalty. Avis Preferred sign-ups increased by 18%, while the number of active Avis Preferred customers increased by 15%.
For Avis Preferred customers we continued the roll-out of our “3-minute promise” programme. Under this programme we guarantee customers their keys and rental agreement within three minutes of entering the service station. If we fail, the customer receives a retail voucher for €30. The “3-minute promise” is now available in France, Germany, Spain, UK, Portugal, Switzerland, Belgium, Netherlands and Poland, and is providing real differentiation in the market place. Approximately 75% of all Avis Preferred rentals within Europe now take place at a 3-minute location.
We achieved the ISO 10002 – CMSAS 86:2000 standard for Quality Management Customer Satisfaction – Complaint Handling and were re-accredited at the beginning of 2008. The standard covers all our European offices and demonstrates that we follow best practice in all aspects of complaint management and continual improvement of performance. During 2008 Avis Germany was awarded the “Best Car Rental Company 2008” by the German Institute for Service Quality (DISQ GmbH & Co. KG).
Awards remain a strong indication of how we are seen by our customers. Our achievements in 2008 included the following: British Travel Awards, Car hire company of the year 2008; British Travel Awards, Best leisure car hire company 2008; British Travel Awards, Best business car hire company 2008; World Travel Awards, Asia’s leading car hire company 2008; Leading car rental provider in Middle East 2008, Business Traveller Magazine; and Britain’s most trusted brand 2008, car hire sector – UK Readers Digest.
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