If you recently rented a car at an airport or anywhere else, you probably won't be happy to endorse the brand as a happy customer anytime soon. Car rental customers are a seriously unhappy a lot these days. People who have grown used to looking up car rental rates and mentally totaling up what they owe for a day's rent, are often in for a rude shock when it comes time to settle these days. Often, whatever figure they mentally prepare themselves for, they find they need to pay sometimes two times that, sometimes even more. Whatever happened to the affordable car rentals from Hertz, Avis, Budget, and Thrifty - let's find out.
Car rental agencies have become much more narrow-minded, more petty about squeezing every last drop out of the customer. For instance, you'll notice that when you are at the counter with your contract, the clerk doesn't seem all that interested in making sure they have taken down every ding, every scratch, every bit of damage left over from the last rental. But when you bring it back, they'll be sure to find anything they can find, and charge you for it. And the car refueling charges that you end up paying? The car rental companies seem to run their own gas economies - their gas prices are nothing like what they are at the gas station. And then there are a bunch of incidental hits - collision insurance, roadside assistance, drop fees if you wish to let the car go at another place - all kinds of add-ons, charges and overheads. The rental companies though, counter by saying that while these things are known to happen, these aren't broad company policy to affect every consumer, as it were. They claim that these are just exceptions that affect one or two customers here and there, and those are for good reasons, if you look for them.
Why do the car companies think that they can get away with this? Actually, a more relevant question would be, why we think they can't. Car rental companies don't deal with static populations. They do business at such places as airports - with floating populations. Most of their customers come only a couple of times, and are so stressed out with their need to make it somewhere on time, that they accept whatever deal is handed to them. And if one dissatisfied customer won't come back, there are always plenty more where he came from. And there are lots of factors outside of the auto rental industry's control that affect their car rental rates too.
To begin with, the way unemployment and expense account cutbacks have been going, car rentals are down nearly 20% since last year. And then there is the tight credit they deal with, and the difficulty they have getting favorable terms from the car companies. And as satellite radio and car navigation becomes more affordable, everyone carries their own around, and don't rent them from the company. At one point, it just became too much for them. For anything else you buy, you always know what it is you're getting into; with car rentals, there is no such luck. Take what happened to a friend a short time ago. He was traveling with his family, and at the airport at the Thrifty counter, he was told he would have to buy insurance. When he protested that his own car insurance would cover any rentals, they seemed to relent, and printed a form out for him. He didn't realize that the conversation he had had with them about ten seconds earlier had no effect on them. He assumed that they had taken the insurance option out, and he signed. And it turned out that they charged him $25 for insurance anyway. He wrote to the company, that their car rental rates were daylight robbery. And you know what? He got a refund.