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- We know car rental prices have risen – very high – during the pandemic, but even with numbers falling slightly in September, most analysts believe they will go up for the holidays.
- Some experts believe things will calm down in 2022, but others don’t see prices returning to normal until 2023. “In February and March of next year, all bets are off,†one expert said. to South Florida Sunshine Sentinel.
- Many problems are behind the price hike, including a lack of production of new vehicles (shortage of chips) and a massive sale of vehicles at the start of the pandemic. The solutions adopted by car rental companies are to keep their fleets longer than before and try to move cars across the country so that they are available where people want to hire them.
Anyone who has tried renting a car in the past year has likely discovered that prices weren’t where they once were, hitting several hundred dollars a day in some areas. Earlier this year, some tourists to Hawaii discovered the joy of saving money by renting a U-Haul truck instead of a standard rental car, for example. As travel begins to pick up despite the reach of COVID, more people may have to find similar alternative rental methods until at least next year.
While the costs of renting a car today are not as high as they were earlier in the year, experts are offering different predictions as to when the rental scene in the United States is will revert to something more normal. Some say it will take at least 2022 before prices drop. Others predict a new peak to come this holiday season, including a spokesperson for Enterprise Holdings, according to the Washington post. And one of them told the newspaper that he doesn’t really see things going back to normal until 2023.
“We’re sort of in a shoulder season with people going back to school and work after Labor Day, but prices are going to go up again in Florida as Thanksgiving and Christmas approaches,” the CEO of the AutoSlash rental car price tracker. com, Jonathan Weinberg, told South Florida Sunshine Sentinel. “In February and March of next year all bets are off.”
The problem, not surprisingly, is the lack of rental cars. As we have already written, car rental companies sold their surplus vehicles at the start of the pandemic and were caught off guard when demand returned earlier than expected. Now, with the chip shortage and other supply chain issues hampering the production of new vehicles, these rental companies are unable to bolster their fleets.
Instead, rental companies change their policies to keep their cars longer before they take them out of the system. Vehicles are being moved from places that once served business travel – which are returning, but still not as high as before the pandemic – and to vacation hot spots in the south. In addition, instead of a 25,000 or 50,000 mile cutoff, some people leave the cars they have run up to 90,000 miles on the clock. Some also buy used cars at auctions to compensate for new vehicles they cannot buy. The To post reports that U.S. car rental companies bought only around 800,000 new cars in 2020, up from more than double that amount in 2019.
This suggests that rental car prices will continue to be higher than expected for some time. We may not know exactly for how long, but Yahoo News, citing the
online rental company Kayak, said searches for rental cars for the upcoming holiday season were up 230% from 2019.
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