Corona has led to sharply rising rental car prices in recent years. At Easter, the signs are pointing to a slight relaxation.
For many popular destinations in Europe, car rental prices at Easter are lower than a year ago. This is shown by data evaluations by the portals Check24 and billiger-mietwagen.de for the German Press Agency. However, the prices are still a long way from the significantly cheaper pre-corona level of 2019. Some of the cars currently cost more than twice as much. And prices did not go down everywhere.
Check24 shows the most significant price declines from Easter 2022 to Easter 2023 in Croatia with a good 45 percent, Greece with almost 20 percent, Spain with almost 19 percent, Norway (10), Cyprus (9) and Italy with 7 percent. This is offset by some significant price increases – especially in less frequently booked destinations such as Australia or Morocco – but also in Portugal, where it went up by a good 24 percent. Across all bookings, there was a drop of a good 3 percent compared to the previous year.
billiger-mietwagen.de also sees the strongest price declines in Croatia, but by 42 percent. This is followed by Spain with a decline of 30 percent, Italy (29), France (26) and Austria with 22 percent. The platform also determines significant increases in less frequent destinations such as Australia with a plus of 24 percent or South Africa with a price increase of 22 percent. In contrast to Check24, Portugal recorded a price drop of 9 percent.
Fleets greatly reduced in pandemic
Differences in the data can be due to slightly different survey periods as well as different booking behavior of the customers of the two platforms.
The rental car prices had risen significantly as a result of Corona and delivery problems from the car manufacturers. After the market crashed early in the pandemic, many providers had severely downsized their fleets. However, when travel activity and thus demand picked up again, the car manufacturers were unable to meet the delivery requests of the rental companies, which made the vehicles much more expensive.
This year there are now significantly more available rental cars, said Andreas Schiffelholz, Managing Director of Rental Cars at Check24. However, the supply is still low, especially for smaller vehicles. Also at billiger-mietwagen.de it is said that the delivery situation for rental vehicles is slowly easing, but that there are still bottlenecks for the popular compact and small cars. Both advise booking early.
Source: Stern
