05.06.2008

ERA convention 2009 will be in London

The European Rental Association held its third convention this week at the RAI centre in Amsterdam. Some 200 or more delegates packed into the Plenary session yesterday, including over 50 different rental companies from all over Europe, along with all of its association members and a fair number of affiliate members – largely equipment suppliers.
Please register to see all images

Plenary session of the ERA

In a surprise announcement during his closing address this afternoon, president Gerard Deprez told delegates that the 2009 convention will be held in London next June.

This years event, coming roughly two years after the ERA was founded, showed positive signs of progress, particularly in the area of statistics, where the association has already published a best estimate for the European rental market’s annual revenues for 2006 and 2007.

It estimates that it grew from around €21.5 million in 2006 to €23.5 million in 200, an increase of 12 percent. It is now working on a major survey of all European rental companies, to provide more detail and accuracy to the 2007 estimate.

The Associations gala dinner, held yesterday evening at the Okura hotel was attended by well over 300 delegates and exhibitors from the adjoining rental exhibition. This year’s dinner was also the ERA’s first award ceremony with eight awards in contention.

The event was a highly polished and sophisticated affair, with five out of the eight awards going to British companies. See yesterdays report. Overall the dinner and the conference were a success, with some interesting presentations and plenty of networking opportunities, not to mention a good atmosphere.

Vertikal Comment

We have in the past been somewhat sceptical of the ERA’s chances of succeeding in its aims, due to the divergent nature of the Europe market, with is drastically different cultures, attitudes, languages and levels of development.

While the association has very little solid tangible achievements to show for its first two years, it has definitely made progress, particularly in the past 12 months, largely thanks to the dedication of the senior managers from several large international rental company members and some association heads along with the determination of its president and secretary general to create a European wide association.

However it still has a very long way to go and will continue to struggle unless it can attract a far larger number of ordinary rental company members to its ranks. This is a real challenge, given the cost of membership and the apparent lack of tangible “in the pocket benefits” for most small to mid size rental companies.

The Association can of course claim to represent over 4,000 of these rental companies through its 12 association members. However, although they would never admit it, many, if not most, of the associations have joined the ERA in order to control this new pan-European organisation from the inside.

The national associations have a strong self interest in keeping the real power, decisions, benefits and thus membership, at a local level. If small to mid size rental companies did begin joining the ERA in preference to their national associations it would dramatically change the status quo and local associations would eventually become like the state rental associations in the USA are in relations to the American Rental Association.

In reality of course many of the day to day issues in Europe are still fought at the national or even provincial level and as long as the national association has some form of European lobbying capability, which it can have through the ERA or other associations, then nothing will change.

The ERA will remain an association of associations along with a few large multi national European rental companies. Maybe this is a perfectly acceptable role for the ERA for now? I have to feel however that many of the founding fathers had greater ambitions than this?