Florida, a directory listing and a new owner.

Alamo Rent a Car began trading in Florida in 1974. The International Directory of Company Histories, in its 1999 entry on the company, says the business opened that year with a small fleet at a handful of Florida locations, and the company’s own history page, archived in 2017, gives the same year and state. The Directory also explains the name: it says Alamo was chosen for the position it would take in classified telephone directories, rather than for any historical reference.

Who should be called the founder depends on the source. The Directory says the business belonged at the start to the insurance financier John MacArthur, and that Michael S. Egan joined in the mid-1970s from Olins Rent-a-Car as the Miami-area manager. In 1978, it says, Egan and several others bought the firm. The New York Times, reporting on 8 November 1996, described Egan as “Alamo’s chairman and founder”.

Under Egan the business set out to serve holidaymakers. The Directory says Alamo courted travel agents, paying them commissions for referrals, kept to cheaper off-airport sites for its early years and concentrated on vacationers rather than business customers. In 1980, it records, Alamo moved beyond Florida by buying the California company Trans Rent-A-Car and gaining operating rights in Hawaii, and it opened a marketing and sales office in London to reach British tour operators. Alamo opened rental facilities in London in 1988 and in Glasgow in 1989, and later bought the British firm Guy Salmon Service, which became Alamo Rent A Car (U.K.) Limited.

The physical setting of the brand also changed. The company says it built its first rental plaza in Tampa in 1982, a large purpose-built pick-up site, and that more plazas followed in leisure destinations including Orlando. In 1985, it says, it introduced a rental agreement the size of an airline ticket. The Directory adds that Alamo tried an on-airport facility in Atlanta in 1981, a tentative step towards commercial customers, and that by the mid-1980s the company referred to its employees as “family members”. English Wikipedia and the company both date an online check-in system, which let renters send their details before arriving and skip the counter, to 2005.

Republic, ANC, Vanguard and Enterprise.

By the mid-1990s the rental business was changing hands quickly. The Directory says Alamo had tried in 1995 to buy National Car Rental from General Motors without success. Instead, Alamo itself was sold. The New York Times reported on 8 November 1996, in a story by Charles V. Bagli, that H. Wayne Huizenga’s Republic Industries had agreed to acquire Alamo, and that Egan would oversee the rental car division at Republic; analysts quoted in the article tied the deal to Republic’s new chain of used-car superstores, AutoNation USA. Two months later, the Times reported on 7 January 1997, Republic agreed to buy National as well, pairing a leisure brand with a business one under the same parent.

Republic changed its name to AutoNation, and in 2000, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel reported on 7 August 2003, AutoNation spun off Alamo, National and a smaller brand as ANC Rental Corp., based in Fort Lauderdale. ANC filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in November 2001, and in August 2003 a bankruptcy judge approved the sale of most of its assets to Cerberus Capital Management. The business that emerged, Vanguard Car Rental, was based in Tulsa and run by William Lobeck.

On 31 March 2007 The New York Times reported that Enterprise Rent-A-Car of St. Louis had said it was acquiring Vanguard, the owner of the National and Alamo brands. The company’s own history page says Alamo was acquired in 2007 by the Taylor family of St. Louis, which owns and operates Enterprise Holdings. Enterprise Holdings has owned Alamo since 2007, and English Wikipedia gives the brand’s base today as Clayton, Missouri.

Since then the name has travelled further. Auto Rental News reported on 30 June 2015 that the Yucatán Lions baseball team had renamed its stadium Kukulcán Alamo Park under a sponsorship agreement with Alamo, unveiling the new name at the Mexican Baseball League All-Star Game that year, and quoted Rob Connors, Alamo’s vice president of brand marketing.

Counters, buses and lots.

A car-rental brand is met in a handful of places before anyone sits behind the wheel: an airport sign pointing to a counter or a garage level, the counter itself, a shuttle bus that loops between terminals and lots, and the lot signage that marks rows, return lanes and exits. Each is a different surface with a different job, from a backlit panel read from across a terminal hall to a painted bus side seen in motion and a small paper or plastic key tag handed over at the end of the process.

That spread of surfaces is what a rental wordmark, its colours and any symbol beside it have to cover, at very different sizes and distances. The same name may appear on a uniform, a bay marker, a receipt and a mobile app, and the business behind it may have changed hands more than once since the sign was first painted.

Each guide that follows sets out who started the name, who has owned it since and how its marks have changed, and separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself.

A borrowed landmark, a jingle and a holiday.

Alamo is a name that, by the Directory’s account, was picked for its place in the listings rather than for its history, and much of the brand’s identity has since been carried by advertising. In the 1980s, the Directory says, Alamo’s advertisements were built around free mileage and aimed at leisure renters.

A later campaign came in 1998. The Directory records a national television campaign that year from Foote, Cone & Belding New York called “Drive Happy”, set to Bobby McFerrin’s song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”, with a tie-in merchandise giveaway.

The company’s history page links the brand to destinations rather than to offices: a partnership with Walt Disney World and Disneyland in 2002, a branch in downtown Waikiki in 2012 and expansion into Uruguay in 2013, by its own account. The 2015 stadium name in Yucatán carried the word onto a ballpark in Mexico.

For a design guide, Alamo shows how a name chosen for a directory listing can be turned into a holiday brand through campaigns and places, and how it can keep its own voice inside a group that also owns a business-travel name. Compare it with National Car Rental, its sibling since the Republic years, and Enterprise Rent-A-Car, whose owners have held Alamo since 2007. For this guide we use Florida blue, sun yellow and sand white with a heavy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Alamo Rent a Car’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.