Yes. The $170 million McCarran Rent-A-Car Center, located a little more than two miles south of Las Vegas’ McCarran International Airport, debuted last Tuesday.
We provided a full description of the car-rental center in the QoD on 9/2/06 (reprinted below), then we ran an update on 11/13/06. During that period, the budget of the center rose $45 million and the completion date was delayed almost six months. But the place has, finally, opened, and it now consolidates 11 car-rental companies under one roof at 7135 Gilespie St. (near the corner of Warm Springs Road).
Now, instead of renting cars at counters in the airport terminal, then waiting for the rental-car company’s own shuttle bus, all customers are boarding common-use shuttles run by the airport to move between the terminal and the rental-car center, a trip that takes five minutes. The airport spent $12 million on 40 15-passenger shuttles to ease curbside and roadway congestion at the airport.
The complex consists of a two-story 131,000-square-foot customer-service building that houses 11 rental-car companies able to handle 10,000 transactions a day, greatly relieving human and vehicle congestion at McCarran (estimates place the vehicle savings at six million trips to the airport annually, as car companies rent 1.8 million cars from McCarran, the nation’s sixth-busiest airport, every year). The massive three-level parking garage has space for 6,000 vehicles. The 125-pump gasoline facility is, reportedly, the largest gas station west of the Mississippi.
