Enterprise, National, Alamo top car-rental rankings

• Enterprise returns to No. 1 after dropping to No. 2 last year
• Hertz, a favorite of many business travelers, comes in at No. 4
• Fox Rent A Car comes in last

Enterprise Holdings' three rental car brands — Enterprise, National and Alamo — sweep the top three spots for satisfaction among airport customers, a survey of customers released Wednesday) by J.D. Power and Associates finds.

It's the first time that all three of Enterprise Holdings' brands have finished at the top of the J.D. Power survey. The Enterprise brand, which finished No. 2 last year after seven consecutive years in the top spot, returns to No. 1 among a dozen brands travelers can choose from.

"Enterprise Holdings has continued to focus on the key drivers of customer satisfaction and created a culture with a service orientation," says J.D. Power Vice President Stuart Greif.

Hertz, a favorite of many business travelers, ranks No. 4 in customer satisfaction in the survey, which has been conducted annually since 1995.

Fox Rent A Car finishes last, and Payless Car Rental is next to last. And relatively unknown ACE Rent A Car, which ranked No. 1 in last year's survey, falls to No. 8.

"Smaller brands tend to have wider swings, because variability in performance in a relatively small number of their locations can have a larger impact on their scores than a brand with hundreds or thousands of locations," Greif says.

The challenge for all auto-rental car companies "is to perform consistently and at a high level, as Enterprise has demonstrated in seven of the last eight years it has been highest ranked," he says.

The survey — conducted on the Internet September 2011 through August 2012 and based on more than 12,100 evaluations of auto rental customers at North American airports — looks at six factors to measure overall customer satisfaction: costs and fees, pickup process, rental car, return process, reservation process and shuttle bus or van service.

The survey also finds that customers throughout the auto-rental industry are more satisfied with the rental companies than they were last year — or any year since 2006.

Of the six factors to measure overall customer satisfaction, only one — reservations process — scores lower in 2012 than in 2011.

"The rental-car industry continues to step up its game, building on improvements in the rental-car customer experience made over the past several years, while also benefiting from higher satisfaction levels with cost and fees relative to prior years," Greif says.