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Driving Up Prices
The Travel Critic · August 31, 1998

Next time you rent a car, read the fine print.

Diane Scholfield forgot to when she booked Dodge Neon from Avis. Her three-day rate in Salt Lake City was listed at $143.97.

"I bought some insurance for $9.99 per day, and I chose the prepay gas option at $13.12," remembers the San Diego, Calif., editor. "Mentally, I'm figuring less than $200 for the rental."

Wrong. Her bill came to $223.78-that's $17.61 in taxes, $14.40 for a "concession fee recoup" and $4.71 for a "trans corridor perserv revolving loan fund."

"I'm getting crabby about hidden charges," she fumes.

She's not the only one irritated at the new math that car rental companies have apparently adopted. I rented a car in Florida about a year ago and shelled out considerably more than my travel agent said I would.

After paying off the state and local authorities, I struggled to make sense of the dizzying gibberish at the bottom of my bill.

Rental companies are coming up with more creative ways of extracting money from travelers. In the past year, for example, auto franchises have quietly imposed a concession fee ranging from 2 to 10 percent on customers who rent from airport locations. The fees, which work something like airport taxes, were once absorbed by the companies. Not anymore.

Avis collected $17 million in concession fees in 1997. Budget got $8 million, Dollar and Thrifty each took $6 million, and Hertz brought in an impressive $24 million.

"Everyone is looking at everyone else as a source of revenue these days," says Steve Swope, senior vice president for consultant Talus Solutions Inc. in Atlanta. "Airports look at car rental companies as a revenue source. The car rental companies look at their customers as revenue sources."

He expects to see more fees in the future as additional auto franchises migrate to airports. He's also looking for more line-item charges on bills, like Avis' cryptic "revolving loan fund," as well as surcharges for car registration fees. (Not always without resistance, it turns out. California and New York have declared airport concession fees illegal.)

You can't blame the car rental industry for trying to squeeze more out of travelers. For the last decade, their average rates haven't even keep pace with inflation.

Car rental agencies didn't give themselves a decent raise until last year, in fact, when overall prices climbed by a modest 5.2 percent.

"I think people understand what's happening," says Jan Armstrong, executive vice president for the American Car Rental Association in Washington, D.C. "Besides, the increases haven't really made a dent in people's pocketbook."

Perhaps. But there's a right way and a wrong way of slapping extra charges on unwitting renters. The correct thing to do, I think, is to be up-front about the fees. That means quoting a rate that includes all the taxes and other levies, just like airlines do on tickets.

Avis doesn't offer that kind of grand total, and as far as I can tell, neither do any of its competitors. Tony Fuller, a spokesman for Avis, says there's plenty of disclosure. "We have a policy that we note our fees in all of our print and broadcast ads. When you call the reservations line, you're informed about them. I think there's fair warning. From our point of view, there's full disclosure."

I called the Avis reservations line to find out what they'd tell me. I asked for the same car Scholfield rented, for the same three-day period. The agent mentioned the 10 percent airport concession fee in the same breath that she quoted my price. So far, so good.

"Is that it?" I questioned.

"No, there's a 9.3 percent Utah sales tax," she said after a long pause.

"Anything else?"

"Yes, a 2.5 percent transportation tax." (Ah, that would be the mysterious "trans corridor perserv revolving loan fund.")

Hmm. I guess it's up to travelers to do the math-and adjust their budgets accordingly. Now that's service.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator and author of A Bridge to Nowhere: A Year in the Florida Keys. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion.