Rental Car Demand Pushes Hawaiian Tourists Toward U-Haul

With car rentals crippled through 2020 as society collectively stopped traveling in response to the pandemic, businesses entered 2021 with the perfect excuse to charge exorbitant fees to lend out some of the cheapest vehicles on the market. Cities have it particularly bad as rental firms find themselves with a surplus of locals wanting to escape and not enough vehicles to serve them. Daily rates now surpass three figures in metropolitan areas and can balloon by hundreds more if a customer wants to return the vehicle out of state (depending on the agency).

However, Hawaii is where things start to get really weird. The islands are reportedly in such short supply of rental cars that tourists are borrowing U-Hauls, where the biggest concerns of mileage and finding a parking space pale in comparison to the upfront cost of something more typical of vacationing families.

According to Hawaii News Now, via Carsoops, the cheapest rental car on Maui in March was a Toyota Camry which cost $722 per day. Convertibles were alleged to set you back hundreds more. But we couldn’t verify that for April since they’ve become impossible to find. While you can bring rates down by booking in advance, those hoping to find a vehicle for less than $200 a day will need to reserve a car roughly a full month in advance or just walk in and hope they get lucky.

By contrast, U-Hauls (cargo van or pickup truck) can be obtained for as little as $19.95 plus $0.89 per mile driven. But some vacationers reportedly spent more on box trucks when nothing else was available in March. It’s definitely one of the sadder life hacks we’ve come across. But it could save you a bundle if the alternative is spending almost a grand per day for a car you don’t even like driving.

From Hawaii News Now:

“The uptick from tourism, the uptick from companies opening back up, from the economy restarting — everybody seems to need a vehicle,” said U-Haul Marketing President Kaleo Alau.

Alau said Hawaii U-Haul facilities are the busiest they’ve been in years.

“Most of the time they’re saying that they can’t get a vehicle from any of the rental spots. They’re all sold out,” Alau said.

We’ve little sympathy for the rental firms here. Hertz was just one of a handful of companies that had to file for bankruptcy in 2020 and dumped their surplus vehicles in a desperate bid to remain solvent. But competitors weren’t interested in taking the risk of buying up a bunch of cheap vehicles just because they might someday see their customers return. Instead, agencies played a similarly conservative game and waited to see who among them could best endure the financial drought. While the lapse in supply might make it seem like they’ve missed an opportunity, they appear to be making up for it with the kind of pricing our older readers might reference as “highway robbery.”

We’re doubtful prices will come down anywhere close to what we saw a few months ago. Most rental agencies were fairly conservative in the number of fleet vehicles they thought they might need going into 2021 and the automotive industry is dealing with supply chain issues that are creating rolling work stoppages. Resupplying rental fleets is going to take some time and companies might not be all that interested when they can charge ludicrous prices in just about every region. We’ll be crossing our fingers for your summer vacation plans, whether you manage to snag the rental you wanted or have to stuff your family into the back of a Ford Transit wearing the U-Haul livery.

[Image: Ken Wolter/Shutterstock]