A J. D. Power and Associates survey of customer satisfaction with the car rental experience, released in November, found the average score declined for the second year in a row after gradually increasing since 2003.

That survey was conducted before an industrywide round of layoff announcements in the last few months: 2,200 positions eliminated at the Avis Budget Group, 4,000 at Hertz, 400 at the Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group and 2,000 at Enterprise, a privately held company that also owns National and Alamo.

“For Enterprise to lay off people is very, very exceptional, while the other companies have traditionally done it over the years,” said Neil Abrams, president of the Abrams Consulting Group, which advises car rental companies.

Mr. Abrams said the industry had been responding to the most difficult downturn he had seen in 33 years. He added, however, that it did have a flexibility that hotels and airlines lacked.

“If you look at the two primary assets in this business, you’ve got cars and you’ve got people,” he said. “The advantage in this industry is that both of those assets are highly scalable and elastic so you can downsize and upsize rather quickly.”

Mr. Abrams estimated that demand for rental cars was down 10 to 15 percent from a year ago, while the industry had reduced the size of its fleet by more than 15 percent. Yet he said companies still managed to raise rates. In his weekly survey of midsize car rental rates at 10 major airports, the average rate in late January was $78.58 a day, compared with $59.76 a year ago.

Companies have also been responding to financial pressures by relying more on technology and by diversifying their business models. Hertz, for example, has installed self-service check-in kiosks at 33 airports and now offers Web check-in. Alamo has made similar changes.