GrizShel

If you like, please continue this thread with your pertinent rental information for a rental carrying a "highway robbery" tax rate.

I believe this is the highest percentage tax I've paid for a non-free car rental:

3 Day weekend rental with Alamo from IAH Airport in Houston
Full-Size Car
Base Rate $30.85

Taxes, Surcharges and Fees
Cons Facility Chg 3.75/day $11.25
Iah Busing Recovery Fee $4.49
Concession Recoup Fee 11.11 % $4.83
Harris Sports Venue Tax 5 % $2.98
Veh License Cost Recov 2.70/day $8.10
Motor Veh Rental Tax (10.0%) $5.95
Subtotal $37.60

TOTAL TAX RATE: 121.9%!

Of course, the way things are going, it won't be too far into the future before some of us will have our income taxed at a similar rate.

Auto Enthusiast

In response to what someone on the Hertz forum said about international rental rates, I checked what the typical European rate is both there and in the US. The US rates for them are cheaper than for us, with all insurance included. By contrast, a basic one-day rental from a neighborhood store (no airport surcharge) in Europe goes something like this:

Base Rate: $37.50 (Pounds or Euros, but similar to a base rate at a US neighborhood rental office)
Taxes: some huge number bigger than the daily rate
Vat at 20%
Total: $102

fairviewroad

The reason why this works out to be such a high percentage is that you got an extremely low rate as the base rate, and some of these charges are flat fees based on the number of rental days. So that skews the overall percentage.

Also, are you sure all of these taxes/fees are imposed by external entities, and not Alamo themselves? Obviously the two items marked "taxes" are indeed, taxes. And I'm pretty sure the busing fee is charged by the airport. I'm not sure about the others.

jackal

Concession recovery fees are technically optional, but in practice, every airport agency charges them, so they're not really "optional." (Airports typically levy a 10% fee on airport concessions, which is why concession fees are typically 11.11%--it's actually a repeating decimal, since the rental agency has to pay the 10% fee on the extra 10% they collect to cover the fee!)

VLF (vehicle licensing fees) can be similarly "mandatory," but it depends on the market. In my experience, fees tend to equalize across the market: if most agencies are charging a particular fee, then all agencies will (to maximize their potential revenue). If most agencies aren't charging the fee, then agencies are sometimes (though not always) reluctant to look greedy and tack on extra fees that their competitors aren't charging. (Here in ANC, the two agencies left that charged VLF finally got rid of it because none of the other agencies did, and it made dealing with other companies harder when everyone needed to hand reservations off to each other when they were oversold).

Consolidated facility charges may or may not be mandated by the airport authority. Here in ANC, it's actually codified into state statute, since the airport is run by the state and the state provided the financial backing for the new rental facility (even though it was built and is operated by a private venture capital group). I'm not sure how it is with other facilities nationwide, though.

FWIW, here in ANC, the total airport rental tax rate is 29.11% + $4.81 per rental day, broken down as such:

11.11% airport concession recovery fee
10% state rental tax
8% municipal rental tax
$4.81/day consolidated facility charge.

For $10 winter rates, that equates to 77% of the total. As fairviewroad said, though, the overall tax rate varies depending on the base rate because of the fixed fees--in the summer, the rate slides down: on a $129/day peak season car, the tax is a measley 33% of the total!

Wiggums

I had my $9 rental go up more than 150% in LAS

GrizShel

Recent Rental at IAH:

Base Rate = $28.00
Taxes: $41.40
Tax Rate = 148%

Maybe we should just skip the car rentals, pool our funds, and buy the state of Texas instead.

CMK10

With Dollar in Kansas City a few months back:

Base Rate: $17.00
Taxes: $27.52

Tax Rate: 161%. Including the lovely $8 arena fee and $6 facility recovery fee.

MDtR-Chicago

It's the daily fees that'll get ya.

Alamo was running a great weekly rate special in PIT recently. On a 5-day rental, priced weekly:

Base rate: $59.00

Taxes and fees: $56.54

Taxes/Fees Rate = 96%. (If I had kept for the full week, would have been 120%)

Even if you only count the things that are really taxes, it's still a 30% tax rate.