PORTLAND, Maine — A few years ago after my car died and I hadn’t yet replaced it, I found myself two or three times a month renting a vehicle for a single day. It was actually a good deal, occasionally a terrific deal. More than a few times in the dead of winter I could get a clean, late-model car at the Portland Jetport, with all taxes and fees included, for less than twenty dollars.
This summer, the cost of a rental car for a day at the Jetport will probably be at least ten times that amount. Whoa! What happened?
“During the pandemic the car rental companies decided they were going to sell off parts of their fleet, thinking that demand was never going to come back,” says Christopher Elliot, who writes about travel for USA Today and The Washington Post. “It came back faster than expected. Then when they tried to scale up and buy more cars, there was a chip shortage and they couldn’t buy enough new cars.”
The result: Too few cars, lots of demand, and higher prices. How high? If you want to rent an SUV at the Jetport for a week in late August, prices start at more than $1100.
Travelers have some options, but they’re not great. For starters, Elliot recommends booking a rental car well in advance, at least two to three weeks before you need it. Car sharing is another possibility, one he considers “a pretty good deal.” His favorite alternative, though, “is that you don’t do a rental car at all. You vacation somewhere where you can use mass transit and you don’t have to have a car.”
That suggestion won’t work for people who want to take a classic road trip and drive wherever they wish. “You got me on that one,” Elliot acknowledges. “Most people are actually using their own cars for those types of vacations.”