Fly into the sun one last time before the dark, cold season begins in Germany: many are currently flirting with that. But if you want to be mobile on site or want to go on vacation by rental car, you currently have to spend a lot of money on your own. The prices of the car rental companies are currently well above the pre-Corona level. This is shown by evaluations from the portals Billiger-mietwagen.de and Check24.
For the travel period October, for example, Billiger-mietwagen.de has calculated an average surcharge of around 40 percent compared to autumn 2019. In Spain and Italy in particular, rental cars have become more expensive – with surcharges of sometimes more than 80 percent. In Germany, the increase is less than 32 percent, but prices in this country have also risen noticeably.
Check24 reports even higher surcharges: Here the difference was calculated for calendar week 40, which has just ended – after all, three federal states were already in the autumn holidays – 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.
Four weeks ago the situation looked different: at the beginning of September, according to Check24, the price increase was only five percent on average, in some countries such as Italy there were even slight declines. It is likely that prices will fall again in November when the holidays and warm days in the south are over again.
The chip crisis is also making it difficult for car rental companies to do business
However, the autumn holidays are by no means solely responsible for the persistently high price level for rental cars. “Regardless of the current autumn holiday season, people’s mobility behavior is approaching the pre-crisis period again,” says Sixt boss Alexander Sixt. The high demand continues to meet a shortage of available rental cars. “One reason for this is that car rental companies had to reduce their rental car fleets during the corona pandemic,” his brother and Sixt boss Konstantin Sixt had already explained the problem in an interview with SZ in June.
Now some car rental companies want to replenish their fleets quickly, but in view of the ongoing chip crisis and the associated reduced production capacities, this is often not that easy. At least Sixt has recently bought a lot and expanded its own fleet again: In the second quarter alone, they added 70,900 vehicles and tried to counter the demand.