Scoop: Advantage Rent A Car Appears To Collapse Again—Company Locations Abruptly Shut Down
Advantage Rent A Car appears to be shutting down. The Las Vegas location apparently closed last week. Their flagship headquarters Orlando airport location closed yesterday. Franchise locations appear to still be open. A Dallas off-airport location also shows closed, and I’m hearing Denver as well.
This was flagged to me by Jonathan of Autoslash which is both a great source of absolute best deals on car rentals and awareness for what’s going on in the industry. This is a scoop since it doesn’t appear the state of play of Advantage
If a separate bankruptcy is filed (and for technical reasons it’s possible there wouldn’t need to be), it would be their fourth bankruptcy.
- A PACER search of the federal bankruptcy docket shows they haven’t filed a new one yet – just their May 2020 Chapter 11 case (Advantage Holdco et al., Del. No. 20‑11259) which remains in post‑confirmation status—ironically the latest quarterly report was filed on Friday.
- No WARN Act notices or Florida or Delaware dissolution filings have appeared for “Orlando Rentco LLC,” “Advantage Opco LLC,” or related entities though databases aren’t going to show the past several days of filings.
- There are no publicly posted concession fee default letters to seemingly-closed airport locations; no cure notices or lease‑termination actions either against Orlando Rentco LLC / Advantage that I can find. Airports have not yet exercised formal legal remedies — so Orlando Rentco may have just walked away and perhaps left a cash deposit large enough to cover near‑term fees.
Multiple recent Orlando reviews report that the Advantage desk is dark and Zezgo employees are honoring — or in some cases refusing — Advantage reservations at the same address.
The 2020 Chapter 11 plan left the estate in a liquidating trust, and Orlando Rentco has been running a much smaller business under the Advantage trademark.
All 8 secured lenders listed in the January 2022 plan supplement appear to still have live liens: Element, NextGear, Bancorp, HFC, Westlake, Merchants, URG and Wells Fargo. I doubt that, and any tax debt and lease financings, can be resolved consentually to be able to just walk away without a new bankruptcy.
It’s notable that franchise locations are separate legal entities. It appears that Atlanta, Houston Intercontinental and San Juan locations, for isntance, continue to operate. You can still go to the Advantage website and book cars, I’d just want to know that I was booking at a franchise location for certain before doing so. Orlando airport, for instance, now just shows no availability so perhaps new bookings are ‘real’ at this point.
company dates to 1963 when it was founded as “$3.99 Car Rentals” in San Antonio. Various brands the group acquired were consolidated under the Advantage name in 1984. The company was sold in 2006, went bankruptcy in 2008 during the financial crisis, and was acquired by Hertz in 2009. However, Hertz was forced to divest them in 2012 in order to acquire Dollar and Thrifty. The next year they were back in bankruptcy and again went bankrupt at the start of the pandemic.