Car Rental Companies in Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal Are Giving Away 25% of Every Booking — Part 1

Every summer, millions of tourists land in Athens, Rome, Barcelona, Lisbon, Tirana, and the islands that surround them. They need a car. And the vast majority of them book it through Rentalcars.com, DiscoverCars, Booking.com, or Auto Europe — platforms that take between 20% and 30% of the booking value before passing the customer to you.

The rental happens. The customer drives your car. But the relationship — their contact details, their preferences, their travel patterns, their loyalty — belongs to the platform.

This is the operating reality for thousands of independent and mid-size car rental companies across Southern Europe. And it’s getting more expensive every season.

The Numbers Behind the Dependency

The car rental markets in Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and the Western Balkans are driven by tourism. Greece alone receives over 30 million visitors annually. Crete, Santorini, Mykonos, the Ionian islands — virtually every major destination sees peak-season demand that outstrips supply, with daily rates on small cars reaching €55–70 in July and August, and SUVs exceeding €120 per day.

For independent operators, this looks like a good business. Until you look at the margin structure:

• OTA commission: 20–30% off the top, every booking
• Insurance and add-on split: often retained or split unfavourably by the platform
• Customer data: zero — name and email (if that) via a booking reference
• Repeat booking rate via platform: near zero — the customer returns to the OTA, not to you
• Your negotiating position: price. That’s it.

Rentalcars.com (owned by Booking Holdings, the same company behind Booking.com) and DiscoverCars are not neutral distribution channels. They are intermediaries with their own loyalty infrastructure, their own retargeting, and their own data assets — built on the transactions your fleet enables.

The Seasonal Trap

Southern European car rental has a defining characteristic: extreme seasonality. A company in Heraklion, Mykonos, or Palermo might generate 70–80% of its annual revenue in a 90-day window from June to August.

This creates a structural dependency: operators need OTA volume to fill capacity in peak season, so they accept the commission terms. Off-season, when volumes are lower and direct relationships would matter most, they have no customer database to reactivate because they never captured one.

The platform solves the peak-season distribution problem. But it perpetuates the off-season silence — and ensures the operator stays dependent on the platform again next summer.

Compare this to what a loyal customer database would enable:

• A March email to last summer’s customers: “Planning your return to Crete? Book direct for 15% off and free GPS.”
• A WhatsApp message to Mykonos visitors from July: “August dates are filling fast. Same car, guaranteed. Tap to confirm.”
• A targeted SMS in October to customers who rented for 7+ days: “Winter long-term rates for locals and extended stays — exclusive to our past customers.”

None of this is possible if you don’t own the customer data. And you don’t, because the OTA does.

The commoditisation problem

When your only lever is price, platforms can race you to the bottom. DiscoverCars and Rentalcars.com display all operators side by side, sorted by price by default. A customer who is 90% ready to book with you chooses the competitor who is €3 cheaper per day — because the platform UI has trained them to think purely in price terms.

Your fleet quality, your local knowledge, your roadside assistance, your flexibility on drop-off locations — none of these differentiators are visible in the comparison grid.

The operators who break out of this model are the ones who build direct relationships where those differentiators can be communicated. That requires owning the customer.

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In Part 2, we show how car rental companies across Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Albania are using Caramel’s autonomous CRM AI agent to capture customer data from every rental, automate multi-channel re-engagement, build direct booking pipelines, and generate the kind of reporting intelligence that OTAs currently keep for themselves.

Read Part 2 →

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Ready to stop paying 25% commission on customers who are already yours?

Book a Demo → See how Caramel helps car rental operators in Southern Europe build direct customer relationships and reduce OTA dependency — one booking at a time.