Fleets are making short-term lease, daily rental and accident management their top priorities for the coming 12 months, according to a survey by contract hire and fleet management provider Grosvenor Contracts.

When asked to rate the importance of the fleet services that support their main contract hire, short-term lease came out on top, with accident management in second place and daily rental third.

The survey of more than 100 fleet operators revealed that demand for the three services was evenly matched, with 51% of fleet managers seeing short-term lease as the most important support service to contract hire, precisely half (50%) viewing accident management as important, and daily rental winning 49%of the vote.

“There’s a sense of cautious optimism as we see economic conditions improving,” said Shaun Barritt, managing director. “However, no-one wants to over commit which is why the use of short-term lease and daily rental is so popular, because both services give fleet operators flexibility and enable them to keep their options open.

“Accident management has always been seen as important, simply because accident costs can be so expensive and the process of handling any incident very time consuming. For this reason, it’s always been a service we’ve seen high demand for.”

In fourth place in the league table of fleet manager’s priorities was risk management (23%), with fuel cards in fifth attracting 20% of the votes, followed by grey fleet management (11%) and salary sacrifice (six%).

“Where we were a little surprised by the findings was with fuel cards, grey fleet management and risk management, where far less importance was placed on these than we anticipated,” commented Shaun.

“All of these services offer cost savings, efficiencies and a whole range of other advantages and perhaps the widespread benefits need to be better communicated, because clients who use these services wouldn’t be without them.”

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