FAST-growing UK car rental company Alamo is to open a new hi-tech customer communication centre for the whole of Europe in Brighton next month. Employing more than 100 staff in its first year it will be fully operational by April when it will replace separate operations in West Drayton and Germany.

The Brighton centre will handle all telephone bookings and customer enquiries from the UK Germany, France, Spain and Italy. However, Mike Jones, Alamo's vice president of sales and marketing, said the new operation would be more than a pan-European telephone centre.

He said: 'This will be the hub for all our customer-service functions, including our national customer relations team and a number of new initiatives we are developing for the whole of Europe.' One of those initiatives is to replace implants with out-plants.

Jones said: 'For some years the car rental industry's standard solution for a large corporate customer has been to provide an implant. The technology of our Brighton centre has enabled us to pioneer, for these customers, the radical concept of an out-plant, with a much larger team of people dedicated through on-screen information to the client's account and special needs, but occupying our space and overheads rather than those of the client.'