Car rental prices soaring to new highs

For those people that are planning to rent a vehicle in the next few weeks and have not done so for a while prepare yourself for a shock. The average price of a hire car has shot up in the past year by up to 50 per cent in some areas. This will come as shocking news as car hire generally has been quite reasonably priced across the world. Also the lack of availability of certain models and sizes might leave you frustrated and not knowing where to turn.

There have been a number of factors in the pricing market that has forced hire firms to increase the cost of rental days. The first major one was last year when after everybody was predicting a large decrease in tourist traffic and expenditure on things like car rental, many firms kept a low fleet of cars. This in-turn made demand outnumber supply making rental cars a higher commodity. Some finance firms would also not finance new car purchases because of the state they believed the tourist industry to be in.

Rightly so, the tourist industry was not the best last year by any stretch of the imagination. Most firms within the trade reported heavy differences in profits compared to those the same time in the previous year and this has had a knock-on affect. To keep the industry, and some firms, going many car hire suppliers have had to increase their costs to keep them from struggling for a second year in a row. There has been many casualties in tourist industry due to the recession and car hire firms are trying not to add to that pot.