When this year’s bidding war among financial firms for beleaguered, bankrupt rental car firm Hertz Corp. ended, the winner was a familiar face to the business travel industry: Certares founder and senior managing partner Greg O’Hara, the chairman of the board of the largest business travel management company, American Express Global Business Travel.
O’Hara’s Certares, along with Knighthead Capital Management and Apollo Capital Management, bested a proposal provided by Centerbridge Partners, Warburg Pincus and Dundon Capital Partners to take Hertz out of bankruptcy more than a year after it filed in May 2020.
The O’Hara team’s package eliminated $5 billion of Hertz corporate debt, including the complete removal of all corporate debt on its European business, and provided the company with over $2.2 billion of global liquidity. Hertz exited Chapter 11 in July, with a new board of directors with O’Hara as chairman. The company in October replaced its chief executive, too, with former Ford chief Mark Fields on an interim basis taking the reins from Paul Stone, though Stone became president and COO.
As board chairman of Amex GBT, O’Hara during the past decade has helped grow the TMC into an international powerhouse, acquiring competitors like HRG and Egencia and culminating with the announcement that GBT will become a publicly traded company in 2022. Can O’Hara pull off a similar story in another business travel sector? The car rental industry is price competitive and challenged not only by the pandemic but also by the associated supply-chain troubles and semiconductor challenges that have played havoc with fleet levels all year.
Still, O’Hara appears set to try, and the company plans “an all-new Hertz that combines the iconic company’s brand strength and global fleet management expertise with new technology and innovations charting a dynamic, new course of travel, mobility and the auto industry.” Big claims, but O’Hara has backed them up before.