The J.D. Power 2015 North America Rental Car Satisfaction Study uses a 1,000 point scale to rate customer satisfaction. It finds that millennials, those born from 1977 to 1994, have the highest level of satisfaction among the generational groups for both business travel (834) and leisure/personal travel (809). The overall average score for the survey is 798, its highest ever under the current methodology which was adopted in 2006.
Baby boomers, those born from 1946 to 1964, are the least satisfied generational group in the study. They had an overall score of 789.
The result is surprising since millennials are often characterized as being highly-critical, entitled, lazy, and narcissistic, says the LA Times.
“Conventional wisdom says that millennials are perpetually dissatisfied, but that clearly is not the case,” says J.D. Power’s Rick Garlick.
He suggests that the unexpected finding may be simply due to millennials getting older. “Younger consumers are often more difficult to please, but as they get older—whether it’s because of maturity, experience, more income or all three—their satisfaction across many studies improves.”
It may be not be an accident that millennials are the most satisfied of the generational groups. Since they are more likely to share their good experience through social media, car rental companies have a good incentive to make them happy; 47 percent of millennials post reviews online, compared to 10 percent of boomers and 27 percent of Gen Xers, notes skift.com.
The highest ranked company in the survey is Enterprise, with a score of 831. National and Alamo also scored above the national average. At the bottom of the list is Thrifty with an overall score of 733.
The study used responses from 12,101 rental car customers who rented a vehicle from an airport location from August 2014 through August 2015.
