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Car rental firms voice concern about Salik

DUBAI — At a workshop held at the Shangri La Hotel yesterday, owners and managers of the car rental industry voiced their concerns to the Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) over the Dubai road toll system, "Salik", which is set to be implemented from July this year.

Over 100 car rental companies in Dubai will be affected by the toll system.

While the entire industry will be affected, owners of larger fleets of cars will have to incur bigger financial costs, they opined.

Several issues were discussed at the workshop, including the system's operation, corporate accounts, tag distributions etc. The car rental operators pointed to the more complicated administrative procedures as a result of the toll system.

Speaking to Khaleej Times, Sunil Kumar, National Rental Operations Manager at Hertz, a major car rental company, said the RTA should issue reusable sticker tags, especially for the car rental industry vehicles. "We have nearly 6,000 vehicles. If we pay Dh50 for buying the tags at a corporate price, then the initial cost for us will come to Dh300,000. We'll also have to shell out another Dh300,000 per month because we need to keep a minimum balance of Dh50 in the tag or else pay a fine," he explained.

Kumar said the plans were also not logistically viable for the company because of a large number of cars are either sold off or taken out of service by the company. "This will imply extra spending on buying stickers each time we have a new car. Moreover, our nature of business is such that we have to use the Shaikh Zayed Road and Garhoud Bridge," he pointed out.

However, Eng. Badr Al Siri, Director of the Traffic Department at RTA, who was conducting the workshop, brushed aside the industry's concerns, saying: "It is only a one time hassle as the tags can be used for life and renewed easily."

Mazahir Zakt, Manager Rental Operations at AVIS, another car rental company, said the RTA and the rental industry still needed to discuss the modality for streamlining the new system for smoother operations. "The Dubai Car Rental Group (DCRG) will have meetings with RTA to sort out the issues," he said.

He added: "It is very likely that we'll have to pass on the additional costs to the customers as we have a huge fleet of cars to maintain. At present we have over 7,500 rental vehicles, and over 1,000 chauffeur driven cars and buses."