Originally Posted by
jackal
Yes, yes, yes.
Sometimes this question gets asked here on FT and sometimes people answer that it must be due to the rental agency trying to get rid of a surplus of SUVs or something, but having been on the other side of setting rates, I can corroborate what mnic and m907 said. It's a mistake. No rental rate manager would ever intentionally offload a more expensive car for less--what happens if/when they oversell on SUVs? There's no upgrade path. Far easier to oversell on cars (even if you're tight on cars but have lots of SUVs) and then have SUVs as a fallback to upgrade people into than vice versa.
Hmm, well not sure I agree that it's a mistake per se. It may be an unintended consequence resulting from their rate management system. For example, a company called Rate Highway offers a tool that allows rental locations to monitor competitor's rates and automatically adjust their own rates in response to price changes at the competition. More info on this
here and
here. Lower prices for higher vehicle classes
could be a mistake, but I would counter that this is definitely not always the case.