Oh no! We're being screwed, too, by Segway rental companies.
A
$5,350 Segway I2 rents anywhere from
$150/day to
$350/day! And we're complaining about $45/day rentals?
Look, folks, I like to rent cars cheaply, too. I cringe at the $750 bill I got for a six-day rental I did from Salt Lake to Denver in May. Granted, $75 of that was for a prepaid tank of gas and a good bit was the $25/day underage driver fee, but it's still a tidy sum.
But the attitude around here seems to be that the rental companies are screwing us and are involved in some giant conspiracy to swindle the traveling public out of their hard-earned dollars and fatten their profits up, when realistically, the rental companies are just trying to stay in business and are responding to market conditions.
Listen to ezmonee--he knows what he's talking about. It seems ludicrous that there are a bunch of posts claiming that "this isn't supply and demand--it's something else," but no one has been able to even put forth a theory about what that something else is--and then when some industry insiders post some thoughts and theories, they're basically ignored (the posts in this thread pretty much haven't even acknowledged any of the points I or ezmonee have made).
Normally, I'm a friendly, easygoing FTer and like to meet everyone and keep everyone happy (I don't think I've ever made a single sarcastic or negative remark in the AS or AGR fora, which I frequent the most), but it's sort of irritating that the only response to my point of view was, "Nope, don't buy that." Everyone after that just kept right on with the line that "rates are skyrocketing and this is horrible and it's not fair and no one has told us why and oh by the way it's not just market forces it must be some giant conspiracy."
Even ezmonee's expertise was basically ignored. Folks, LISTEN TO HIM! He's telling you the honest truth about what's going on!
It seems silly that everyone's in such an uproar that rental car rates are rising and is ignoring attempts to explain how costs are rising, but although people are annoyed that airline fares are rising, they understand it's a perfectly rational and understandable response to fuel costs rising. Well, fuel costs to the airline industry are analagous to fleet costs to the rental industry. Maybe you'll all get it when one or two of the major rental companies declare bankruptcy like some of the airlines have.
If you think rental rates of $200 to $300 per week are unfair and you feel like you're being scalped, well, then go start your own rental car company. It's not easy to be profitable when, for example, a small location's (with a fleet of around 1,000 cars) car payment is around $650,000 per month, maybe more. Crunching some rough numbers, I'd say that, given the average length of rental and number of rentals such a location would do per day, you'd need to rent cars at LEAST at $35 per day. When you factor in weekly rates and cheap weekend deals and the spread in rates you can get from the various car classes and all of those things, you have to offset those below-$35/day-averages with above-$35/day rentals. And that's just to cover the car payment. There's another $30,000 per month (or more) for staffing costs. We haven't even touched all of the other expenses (computer systems, data lines, airport leasing costs, facility and parking area mortgages, etc.).
I don't mean to be critical of other FTers. I don't intend this as a personal attack and don't have any one person in mind but rather am just trying to illustrate the absurdity in the overall attitudes I see in this thread. I'm not blindly trying to defend the industry, either--I understand that there are some unethical RAC operators out there and do not support their fraudulent tactics. But I feel insulted when someone throws out a broad accusation that
all RAC operators are greedy and unethical or that locations of a particular company should be avoided because of a bad experience one person had at one location (and honestly, having worked in customer service for five long years, it is my impression that
most (but, yes, not all) "bad experiences" are brought on by the customer's own stupidity). I feel the same way about this thread--like all rental agencies are being accused of bad business practices. That offends me. Some of us are trying to run an honest business, but if we don't respond to the market in this way, we might be gone by the next season.