ezmonee

back in 1970 in denver, it was about 25-30 dollars a day, plus 20 cents a mile, to rent a car.

through most of 2006,2007 the average cost to rent a car was 25-30 dollars a day, unlimited mileage.

c'mon guys. you act like a price increase wasn't coming....

seriously, as long as you are WILLING to pay the 300 a week rates, theres zero chance of it going down. if 20% of the traveling market decided it was cheaper to taxi-it, the prices would drop like a lead balloon even if meant operating in the red.

there IS NO new pricing model bieng tested. The truth is they have less cars to work with and what cars they do have have been procured at a greater cost, regardless of any observations on the number of cars on the lots.

Guys, when I worked in San Jose, there were at least 5 lots where I stored cars, only one of which (other than the main rental lot) was visible to the end user in any fashion. In those 4 lots not seen by customers eyes, I was able to store 3,000 cars. Or 0 cars. But typically on any given weekend (remember, avis was a weekday juggernaut, weekend leisure rentals wasnt avis' thing) there were 1,000 cars on the lots. I am willing to bet that nowadays those car counts are in the sub-150 car range and what cars they do have on lot are SUV's and minivans.

When I worked in Hawaii no matter which lot on any island there was storage lots for thousands of cars for the off season, but even so with the notable exception of specific high demand weekends there was still 300-400 cars sitting on the lots in reserve. Because of this thread I drove by the local storage lot and saw zero, none, nada cars in there.

Its important to iknow that Hawaii's tourism is DOWN right now, so for those lots to be empty means either they had less cars to begin with, or because demand was down they "turned back' a ton of cars in an attempt to save money. Either would have the effect in a pure yield based system of driving up prices.

Yield pricing goal is for the last car on the lot to be available for 1 million dollars a day. Every car reserved decreases supply, increases demand (for those of who have taken economics), and every time the supply decreases, and the price increses, the more people who rent as the supply decreases, the equilibrium point shifts.