- Shortage of available cars in popular vacation destinations is driving prices up, with travelers often paying hundreds of dollars for a basic vehicle.
- Florida, Hawaii, and Arizona are among the most affected states, and rental car companies do not expect their fleets to increase for months.
- The shortage was prompted by a massive sell-off of rental cars last summer as rental car giants raced to decrease their fleets with the drop in travel.
The arrival of spring breakers to Florida last month had caused significant shortage of rental cars throughout the state, but the shortage hasn't abated in the past three weeks as more Americans are making travel plans to sunny places for May and beyond. The supply of rental cars in the southern half of the state is still being readily felt, with travelers being encouraged not to make last-minute plans and book cars weeks in advance.
A quick survey of rental car locations in Miami and Fort Lauderdale is still showing very limited supply, with prices for one-day rentals of convertibles hovering around $500. The situation further up the coast isn't much better with slim pickings for vehicles, including panel vans.
"It's the same thing we saw a month ago in Florida. There just aren't that many options on the travel sites," one traveler from Vermont told Autoweek.
Rental locations are now looking out to another wave of travel in the second half of May, as college graduations begin to loom along with the summer beach travel. Graduations are the next big travel event around the U.S., and they're bound to stretch rental car availability even further in all parts of the country.
As bleak as things currently look for travelers to Florida, the situation has been even more dire in Hawaii, which has an even more finite supply of cars for the next few months. Of course, airport locations are especially affected by shortages, as they are in other sunny destinations in the U.S. at the moment, but travelers to Hawaii often don't have the option of taking a cab to a location an hour away to pick up a vehicle.
"We looked at going to Maui at the end of April for a week and renting a car there, but now we're just not going to get one there and we'll just stay put at the hotel" one family from Washington D.C. told Autoweek. "It used to be easier this time of year, before the pandemic of course. We looked around this year and we're just not going to rent a car at all."
The difference between Hawaii and Florida when it comes to rental cars, of course, is not only the number of rental car locations, but the rental car companies' ability to shift large numbers of cars to a particular location. Last summer thousands of cars were shipped off the islands to be sold, as rental car giants moved to reduce their fleets, but now the companies are having a hard time resupplying their rental locations with cars and staff.
Rental locations in Hawaii now expect the shortage to last well into the summer.
The shortage itself was prompted by moves made by rental car companies last spring to greatly reduce the sizes of their fleets across the country, in an attempt to stay afloat financially. Virtually all rental car giants had reduced their fleets in the weeks following the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S., sending hundreds of thousands of cars to used car lots or their own sales locations.
The problem that arose in the past several weeks—following the rollout of coronavirus vaccines and state reopenings—is that rental car companies have not had enough time to increase their fleet sizes or the numbers of their employees, from a low point last summer.
Are you planning to travel and rent a car in the next two months? Let us know in the comments below.
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