New Car Rental Facility Opens at McCarran Airport

Renting a car at the Las Vegas airport just got easier with the opening of the new $167 million McCarran Rent-A-Car Center.

With the new facility, all eleven of the car rental companies will be housed in the same building and will share common-use shuttles to ferry customers from the airport terminals to the rental center. The rental companies will also share fueling and cleaning stations. Over 1.8 million car rental contracts were issued last year at McCarran, according to the Clark County Department of Aviation, so this should streamline operations greatly.

Housed at this new facility are Alamo, Avis, Advantage Rent-A-Car, Budget, Dollar, Enterprise, Hertz, National, Payless, Savmor and Thrifty. Car rental companies that aren’t represented at the new centralized facility have to pick up their customers from there as well. No car rental facilities will be housed at the airport building itself anymore.

Customers should benefit by having all of the cars under the same roof as the rental counters. For starters, they’ll be picking up their cars outside of the airport, reducing congestion and making it easier should there be problems with the rentals. Customers will also be able to get to the Rent-A-Car center faster since they only have to wait for the next center shuttle, instead of waiting for the next individual rental company shuttle. The shuttles should pick up outside of doors 10 or 11 at the airport.

However some early reports from guests to the city are reporting longer walks from the counter to the actual cars, which can be a problem when saddled with a lot of luggage.

The new facility is located at 7135 Gilespie St and is modeled after similar facilities at airports in Phoenix, San Francisco and Dallas.

As for the in-airport rental counters that are now empty, sources say those will be removed and the space used to expand the baggage claim area. The airport also has plans to turn the the parking lots that formerly held rental cars into extra long-term parking for the airport.