Anyone who takes a rental car during the autumn holidays has to dig deep into their pockets. The prices are well above the level before Corona, as evaluations by the portals Billiger-mietwagen.de and Check24 show. The reasons are the increased demand, the aftermath of the Corona crisis and the lack of chips.
Billiger-mietwagen.de has calculated surcharges of around 40 percent compared to 2019 for the travel period October in typical travel countries. In Spain and Italy in particular, rental cars have become more expensive with surcharges of more than 80 percent. In Germany, the plus of a good 32 percent is less but still significant.
Check24 reports even higher surcharges: Here, the difference was calculated for calendar week 40, which has just ended, and is a whopping 78 percent compared to 2019. The comparison portal also sees particularly large differences in Spain and Italy with 151 and 131 percent surcharges, respectively. For Germany, it calculates a 93 percent increase in prices.
Check24 also compared the current situation with the prices four weeks ago, i.e. outside the autumn holidays. Here the increase is only five percent on average, in some countries such as Italy there are even declines. In Germany the plus is twelve percent.
Apparently, it is less the autumn holidays than a generally high price level for rental cars that is leading to the increases compared to 2019. Even if the portals report that there is currently high demand.
Sixt boss Alexander Sixt points in this direction: “Regardless of the current autumn holiday season, people’s mobility behavior is approaching the pre-crisis period again,” he says. “The high demand continues to meet a shortage of available rental cars.” That is why one can currently see “a few increased prices for rental cars”.
On the one hand, Sixt sees the low supply of vehicles due to the chip crisis and reduced production capacities as the causes of the ongoing shortage. On the other hand, the rental car fleets were reduced in size during the Corona crisis. However, Sixt has recently been buying heavily and expanding its fleet again. In the second quarter alone, 70,900 vehicles were added.