The scene sounded like something out of a zombie movie: an empty parking lot, angry wanderers desperate for a lifeline.
“It’s the
hunger games out here with people fighting for cars because you have none…in
the Atlanta airport? NONE?” wrote award-winning actor and singer Audra McDonald
in a tweet last week. “And when one comes up
people are all running for it? This is ridiculous.”
The missive
was directed at Hertz, which emerged from bankruptcy on June 30. But few
rental car companies have come out unharmed in this year of car shortages and
price hikes.
After selling off huge portions of their fleet during the pandemic, operators have had difficulty building their inventory back up to meet the demand of a rising tide of travelers. Last month, the travel booking site Hopper said prices were up 95 percent compared to the beginning of the year. A shortage of semiconductors is holding up car production, making the situation even more dire.
“We’re in a
situation where everything is expensive everywhere,” said Jonathan Weinberg,
founder and chief executive of the discount car rental site AutoSlash.
Representatives for Hertz and Enterprise did not respond to a request for comment, and Avis Budget Group declined to answer questions.
Stories of
painfully long waits, nonexistent cars and astronomical prices are common on
social media. Some frustrated customers have taken to invoking a scene from the sitcom “Seinfeld,” in which
comedian Jerry Seinfeld reacts to a car rental company running out of cars:
“You know how to take the reservation, you just don’t know how
to hold the reservation.”
The low-inventory, high-price trend started emerging earlier this year in leisure areas including Florida, Arizona and Las Vegas, and then spread to Hawaii, Alaska and national parks and to the rest of the country as travel continues to pick up.
Weinberg, AutoSlash CEO, said
his company is seeing prices typically between $100 to $150 a day for an
economy car.
Neil Abrams,
president of the auto-rental-focused Abrams Consulting Group, believes the
landscape will stay the same into next year.
“When will
this situation normalize?” he said. “I think when computer chips begin to flow
freely again and auto manufacturing increases to pre-pandemic levels, we will
see a more normalized market and more stable pricing.”
But Abrams
cautioned that even if rentals get more affordable, 2019 prices might be a
thing of the past.
Companies
“may learn that higher prices with fewer cars are better than lower prices with
more cars,” he said.
