Why are car rentals advertised for $6 a day but the cheapest is always $77?
 

Looking at a week long rental pickup and drop off in Wausau.

Everybody and their brother within 50 miles of here is ungodly expensive.

I used to get $99 specials all the time ~4 day.

WTF happened? All my vehicles are continuously getting smacked by animals or requiring wheel bearings every 3000 miles so I actually am stuck needing a rental if I want to do anything but it appears to not matter when I pickup or from whom.

Is there anything that isn’t more than a house and property tax payment?

You used to be able to buy a [$100] car on one coast, drive to the other and sell it.

For local needs, borrowing a friend or family members car is the easiest and cheapest solution.

For travel transportation, the best rates are had with corporate accounts. Failing that, perhaps one of the car sharing networks (Turo for example) beats the corporate pricing?

My long term solution is to recommend every household to have at least 2 vehicles.

Big to-do this AM on my NPR (or was it RteS? BBC?) site whining about googles new released version of search killing/burying anything not to the advantage of google. Apparently if you drill down a page or five, the results become more relevant.

Alternatively, back when there was Avis, hertz, budget you could obtain loss rates because they were drumming up activity. And unsurprisingly, they would come back empty of fuel which was refueled at 3-4 times the local rate.

No more competitive agencies, no need for enticing rates. When I just got back from Europe, there was only one car rental desk but with hertz and budget uniforms. A lot of uber and lyft cars in the pickup atea, however.

No local family and I own 3 cars but all broke down in different ways at the same time, been a race of which gets parts first, been driving on bad wheel bearings for weeks waiting for them.

I'm down to three too; a rolling chassis, one sidelined for an engine refresh, and the weekly driver that needs tie rod ends, a muffler, and electrical work.

OTOH I need to walk more for my health.

This is, to some degree, a problem local to the USA. In NZ, as long as I don't try to book it same-day, I can get a rental car for around $20-30nz ($12-18us) per day.

I also keep a ride sharing app on my phone. I can pick a Tesla up on most street corners and drive it for US 55 cents per minute, or US$12 per hour, with no need to recharge or refuel, and they're city parking cost exempt which means it's often cheaper to drive one and dump it somewhere than to take my own car and park it. Or I can just take the bus. Or walk.

I have no idea why things have become so expensive in the US. It isn't just car rentals. New Zealand once had a reputation for being expensive, but I had sticker shock at just how cheap most everything was when I moved here, while the bottom 90% of society have higher per-capita income.

Just one of many things I wonder about. :confused:

How do you mean expensive? Usa is generally cheaper than EU for some things, very hard to compare since a liter and a quart aren't the same size and you have to compute the euro cost to dollars. Add zloty with decimals to the mix and your brain shuts down.

My cost of living, after currency conversion and unit conversion, is somewhere in the ballpark of "half" on this remote island in the south Pacific.

Healthcare - 0
Car insurance - $8us per month
Utility rates - around 25% lower than in a coal burning Midwest state
Actual utility usage - considerably lower, due to mild climate
Food - lower, but varies
Transportation - Drastically lower, despite fuel prices, due to structural/social factors
Rent - lower in the capital city than in Detroit suburbs

Etc etc

Perhaps it favors pensioners?

I 'Braved' (I don't Google unless I must) cost of living in "New Zealand", and the AI had this to say;

I've been finding the built-in Brave AI results to be useful for summarizing things and quickly finding pertinent information. Seems to be a summary of about the top 3 search results.

Two questions there. The first is why isn't the advertised rate the actual rate. That is pretty much unique to the USA were companies are not required to advertise the real price inclusive of all taxes and mandatory fees.


Why are car rentals so expensive right now? You may remember a few years back when rental companies were teetering on the brink of bankruptcy as the world shut down and people stopped travelling. Rental companies dumped cars at a loss and took on a huge amount of debt just to keep out of bankruptcy. Then they took on more loans to buy back inventory when travel took off again at the same time there was a shortage of new cars and car prices were crazy. Rental companies are a business and those loans must be repaid.

Then there are greatly increased labor costs as people decided their had a new minimum value.

Then there is simply supply and demand. People are travelling like crazy. Airports are full, planes are packed, and people are renting cars. Car rentals are 10% higher today than they were in 2019.

Healthcare is not free in New Zealand. It is paid for by taxes - which is a far more effective and cheaper way to pay for a population's health care - but it still has a cost.

I do find USA pricing for most everything a pain. We don't include sales tax on most things, which is a pain because if I have $5, and the ice cream costs $5, then I don't have enough for the ice cream, which actually might be a good thing.

We just bought some plane tickets, which is another pain. Flat rates don't exist, and we tend to buy tickets for emergencies or at least urgent things that we weren't expecting. So while someone else who had the time to plan ahead got the same flight for $50, we end up paying $500 per person. Then we've even, after all that cost, have ended up being the ones who get denied a flight due to overseating the plane and then end up missing the funeral that weekend.

But it is what it is. I have a passenger van rented for an upcoming weekend this summer, and it is not cheap by any means, over $1,000. But it's cheaper than buying a newish passenger van for those two or three times a year I need one. It is what it is. Maybe one of these days I'll get into the turism business and get a bus to take people to all the pretty sights here in Colorado, that way I'll always have a big vehicle for those occasions. However, there are a lot of unkowns for me on that kind of work. If only the local busing and transport companies paid more than near minimum wage, I'd actually get back into that line of work.

We can agree to call it "paid for by taxes".

I made a spreadsheet of the effective taxes paid. Taxes paid are around 11% lower at every income point above $100,000USD, and the advantage is larger at lower incomes. First $10,000US, NZ taxes paid is 55% lower. By US$30,000, the taxes paid are 36% lower. The effective rate for a seven figure earner is still 11% lower.

The average out of pocket expense for someone in the US for healthcare is roughly equal to a third of the taxes paid by the median income earner in NZ.

The median income earner in NZ has now exceeded the median earner in the US, before taxes. Median individual wealth (not average) is around twice as high in NZ as in the US. Also, my life expectancy has gone up by 7 years moving here.

A median income earner and a minimum wage earner together have the income to qualify for (and afford to pay for) a mortgage on the median house in both Wellington and Auckland.

The numbers look pretty bad for the US from virtually every angle. I can guess what might be going wrong, but it's hard to know for sure.

I asked AI for similar numbers from the USA. If the average cost for a single person in New Zealand is $815-$1000(NZD) per month, which is $500-$613USD, here are the USA numbers:

In other words, AI seems to think the cost of living in the USA for a single person is around 6x higher. With approximately the same median income, and a higher tax rate.

Yes, it is a pain and very weird. Working for a large multi-national company I have a lot of coworkers from other countries. (12 countries in my department at last count). When they first come to the USA they find it VERY odd that the listed price is not the actual price because we are pretty much the only country that allows that kind of deceptive marketing.

It is a combination of anti-tax philosophy* and lack of consumer protections.

(*The idea that paying taxes should be painful and very noticeable. )

Well the DOT just rolled out new rules on that which will go into effect in October if they are not put on hold from the lawsuit. Airlines will not have to display the cost for added fees like fees for seat selection and bags clearly before the ticket is purchased. They also must automatically and fully refund the ticket price of any flight that is cancelled, delayed more than 3 hours on departure or arrival (domestic) and delayed more than 6 hours (international)

Who gets bumped when a flight is oversold depends on various factors as does the pecking order of who gets rebooked first on a standby flight. Ticket price is key but other things matter too.

Frequent flyer status. You should ALWAYS sign up for the frequent flyer program for the airline you are flying. Just being a base member puts your above about 1/3 the people on a flight.
When you check in also matters with the earlier the better. You should also always check in online the day before your flight - preferable as soon as possible. Never wait to check in the same day at the ticket counter.
You should also purchase your ticket directly from the airline not through a 3rd party reseller. If you have a 3rd party ticket you are pretty much on your own and airlines will tell you to talk the 3rd party that sold you the ticket if anything happens.

BTW, flat rates do exist - just not at the bottom end of the price range. You can buy a ticket on Southwest that includes 2 checked bags - no extra fees.

If you buy a regular economy ticket on other carriers instead of a discount economy ticket those include carry on bags and seat selection. Bags are extra but bag fees are pretty easy to find with a quick internet search.

Another way to describe it is transparency. People should know how much the price of something is tax. Pro-tax people should get warm fuzzies seeing all that money going to the government to be wisely and benevolently spent.

There's tons of deception in pricing. In Oregon, there's no way (at time of purchase) to tell how much of the gasoline bill was federal and state taxes. A bottle of booze includes taxes, so there's no way to tell how much of the cost is the product, and how much is taxes, and there's thousands of other examples of this.

Keeping people uninformed so they aren't confronted with feelings about it is deceptive.


Generally true. Try finding bag fees for Frontier Airlines. It's nowhere on their website.

Transparency is easy even with inclusive pricing where the real price is the price on the price tag - it can be listed on the receipt.

Looking at a grocery store receipt from a recent business trip to Mexico

Total price - 220.50 pesos. (The price listed on price tags)
Of that price 11.03 is IVA tax and 8.07 is IEPS tax.

I know exactly how much I paid in tax and the price listed on the price tax was the actual price.


A google search of "Frontier Airline Bag Fee" returns:
https://www.flyfrontier.com/travel/t...s/?mobile=true

Which then links to:
https://www.flyfrontier.com/optional...s-for-new-trip

https://ecomodder.com/forum/attachme...0&d=1717110492

That's the correct way to do it, but many things we purchase don't have those details, like gasoline.

I don't know how you got that image, because I've clicked every link on their website 3 times and never found a price sheet. I'd get into a recursive loop where I click "bag pricing" which takes me to a page that talks about overage fees, and then a link back to the original page.

I've had better service in prison. Unfortunately they have the best pricing and direct routes to where I need to go.

You obviously didn't click on the second link I provided. You then have to put in a flight because Frontier bag charges vary based on the flight.

https://ecomodder.com/forum/attachme...1&d=1717127031

Thanks! I'll try to keep that all in mind. The only airline into our town is United. The next town over now has Frontier too, but it is now 3 hours to drive there instead of the 1 hour it used to be. One might as well as drive to Denver where the flights are much cheaper.

The thing is we've flown on a different airline every time we've flown. Once on United, once on Interjet (now bankrupt), once on Viva Aerobus, once on Spirit, now this is the second time on United. Those are all our flights in our whole lives.

The only time we had planned several months in advance to go on a flight was right before COVID hit. We ended up not being able to go, so got a 2-year cupon to apply to another flight, but then never used it so lost the money.