Car rental charges--My wife and I went to Albuquerque
It’s legal, but whether it’s moral is another question. Travelers have always been subjected to inflated prices by the unscrupulous and given us the phrase “whatever the traffic will bear.” One of traveling Europeans’ biggest gripes in North America is tacking on a 5-10 percent charge for sales tax. (In Europe , posted prices typically include sales tax-like charges.)
A few years ago, municipalities and states everywhere decided that travelers were an easy mark to tax. Local folks typically don’t rent hotel rooms or cars at airports. So by collecting a steep hotel tax or rental car tax, public officials can collect a lot of revenue from people who can’t vote them out of office at the next election.
The trouble is, most of us travel at some time or other and end up having to pay these charges. These communities aren’t really shifting the tax to somebody else, rather politicians are cleverly evading responsibility for the financial decisions they make.
The rental car companies have seen this practice and decided to get in on the act. They’ve added charges for such things as “concession recovery fees” (rent?), “energy recovery fees” (isn’t the customer the one who is the one buying the gasoline?) and other charges. You don’t pay your supermarket’s rent bill or light bill through a separate charge, why should car rental be any different? Generally, these charges are quoted as “estimates” so if the company (or the local politicians) want to raise them before you pay, they can.
Almost every city has extra charges on car rentals beyond the ordinary sales tax, but they vary widely between cities. Generally, there are more of these extra taxes and charges at airports. The rate one customer is charged can be quite a bit different than what another customer pays. This is because these charges are often quoted on a per-day, per-rental or percentage charge. For example, the tax rate on a shorter rental will be higher if there are “per-rental” extra charges like the $20.00 per rental “transportation and facilities fee” in San Francisco. (It’s $10.00 at the nearby Oakland Airport.)
Albuquerque is not alone in having pretty steep extra charges to rent a car. I recently checked the website of a major rental car company for the price of a two-day summer weekend compact car rental in several American cities. These quotes included sales taxes of as much as 20 percent. The period I checked was for Friday, July 8 through Sunday, July 10.
In Albuquerque, the extras for this rental were 48 percent of the base rate. The same car at Chicago’s O’Hare airport was subject to a 41 percent charge. In San Francisco, the charges were 39 percent. New York’s LaGuardia Airport was a relative bargain at 33 percent. The lowest I found was Rockford, Illinois, where the extras were “only” 10 percent.
The rental companies frequently don’t clearly identify which of these charges were their own ideas, or the name of the taxing body who thought up these fees. And, because they are very clear that these charges are “estimates,” you really can’t compare one company’s fees to their competitors, whose extra fees and taxes often vary. This prevents you from shopping around to get the lowest overall cost.
It doesn’t seem like it’s asking too much to be quoted a fair price that includes all charges and know it will be honored. But unless we get a federal law mandating more transparency in car rental pricing, it doesn’t look like we are going to see an improvement any time soon.
