Posted: Thursday, May 25, 2006 7:00 pm
As gas prices have increased, rental demand for economy and mid-sized cars has increased, local car rental employees report.
BY NATE JENKINS | Lincoln Journal Star
Michael Van Cleave was flying solo on a business trip, not a family vacation, when he landed in Lincoln after a red-eye flight a few days ago.
A modest, mid-sized car would have suited him fine while bopping around town, and that’s what he asked for from the car-rental company.
Instead, the computer software worker from Denver ended up with an SUV that gets 15 miles per gallon in the city and has enough space to hold a basketball team.
The car-rental employee apologized, but Van Cleave shrugged it off as a business expense that wouldn’t hurt his personal bottom line.
“It’s no bother,” he said after returning the vehicle at Lincoln Municipal Airport Thursday. “I don’t pay for them, so it makes no difference to me.”
People paying out of their own pockets may not be so blase.
Still, they shouldn’t be surprised if they are offered a similar apology in the age of near-$3 gas.
Want a sedan that gets 35 miles per gallon to travel this Memorial Day so you don’t have to use your gas-guzzling SUV? You may be too late for this high-traffic weekend — and even during comparably lower-traffic days this summer.
As gas prices have increased, rental demand for economy and mid-sized cars has increased, local car rental employees report.
In her Omaha office of National Car Rental and Alamo Rent A Car, Leah Foust ran some numbers that illustrate the point.
About 120 mid-sized and economy cars were slated to leave the lot Thursday, nearly wiping out its inventory of such cars. How about SUVs?
“We’ve only had five reservations today,” said Foust, general manager for the company’s Lincoln and Omaha markets. “We’ve got 50 sitting here right now.”
Nowadays, a lot of customers ask “How’s the gas mileage?” when deciding what to rent, Foust said.
“That used to never be a question, but a lot of people want to know that now,” said Ben Ferris of Thrifty Car Rental in Lincoln. Like Foust, he had plenty of SUVs and large cars to rent.
“Usually, it’s not hard to get rid of the larger cars,” Ferris said at a car-rental counter inside the airport. “But lately, it’s been more difficult.”
After doing some simple math, some SUV owners have decided that it is cheaper to spend around $40 a day to rent a smaller car with good gas mileage than paying $70 to fill their SUV tanks after a few hours on the highway.
Bob Adams of Avis Rent A Car said he has three or four customers who have found that the figures fall on the side of renting cars to avoid driving their SUVs on out-of-town trips. One of them, for example, owns a Suburban but rents a mid-sized car when leaving town.
And at least one business, he said, requires its employees to rent cars for out-of-town business travel.
So is demand for smaller cars driving up costs of renting them, and less demand for SUVs pushing down their rental costs?
Not yet, at least not at Lincoln car rental outlets contacted by the Journal Star.
Reach Nate Jenkins at 473-7223 or njenkins@journalstar.com.