Enterprise Rent-A-Car opens in Dickinson Wednesday

Dickinson just got a little friendlier to those who find themselves on the go.

Enterprise Rent-A-Car opened its very first Dickinson location at five hundred thirty one W. Villard Street on Wednesday. According to a release, the office is the only Enterprise-branded rental car option within a almost 100-mile radius.

Jason Clarke, vice president and general manager of Enterprise’s regional subsidiary that includes North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana and parts of Nebraska and Minnesota, said the fresh facility will service the state’s southwest area and has been planned for about two years.

Clarke said the oil boom real estate market was such that it “took a while to find this location” but the final placement is well-suited to the rental offices’ needs.

“We specialize in being the hometown, home city rental car company and this puts us in proximity to a lot of our different accounts, like insurance replacement and dealership replacement-type business,” he said. “But also this gives us superb proximity to the (Dickinson Theodore Roosevelt Regional Airport) and gives us the capability to service that at same time.”

Clarke said Enterprise had many Dickinson-area customers from the oil and gas industry, in addition to the auto dealership and insurance provider markets, who had asked the company to bring in a more local location over the last few years.

The Dickinson office has three staff members with the possibility of adding more in the future.

Clarke said Enterprise typically recruits latest college graduates, which makes the presence of nearby Dickinson State University a potentially “good talent pipeline” to the Villard location and its business group.

Beyond Dickinson, Enterprise also operates in the North Dakota cities of Williston, Bismarck, Fargo, Minot and Grand Forks.

Clarke said the company as a entire has a global fleet of about 1.7 million cars and the number of vehicles at the local store will “vary a lot.”

“This location is one of about Five,600 that Enterprise has coast-to-coast,” Clarke said of the Dickinson store. “We attempt to be within about fifteen miles of ninety percent of the U.S. population and this location is permitting us to proceed to do that.”

Andrew Haffner covers higher education and general assignment stories for the Grand Forks Herald. He attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he studied journalism, political science and international studies. He previously worked at the Dickinson Press.

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