Rental car prices in Florida, Hawaii and mountain resort markets can multiply within a few weeks. The cause is the physical difficulty of moving a fleet rather than opportunistic pricing alone.
A fleet is a fixed asset in a specific place
Rental companies buy or lease vehicles months ahead and assign them to regions based on expected demand, which means the supply at any airport is essentially fixed in the short term.
Unlike an airline that can reassign an aircraft in a day, a rental operator must physically drive or ship cars between markets, which takes time and costs money.
When a destination's demand doubles for a school vacation week, the fleet cannot double with it, so price becomes the only mechanism left to balance the two.
Utilization is the number the business runs on
An idle vehicle still depreciates, still carries financing cost and still occupies a parking space, so operators aim to keep as much of the fleet rented as possible.
Sizing a fleet for peak weeks would leave it badly underused for the rest of the year, which is unaffordable in a business with thin margins.
Fleets are therefore sized closer to average demand, guaranteeing shortages at the peak and steep pricing whenever those peaks arrive.
Island and remote markets are the extreme case
Where cars must arrive by ship, adding capacity for a busy period takes weeks and cannot be reversed quickly if demand disappoints.
Operators in those markets keep tighter fleets as a result, so shortages appear earlier and prices rise further than on the mainland.
The same dynamic affects small resort markets served by a single airport, where a handful of flights can fill the entire available fleet.
Reservations are not the commitment they appear to be
Most rental reservations carry no penalty for cancellation, which means bookings overstate real demand and operators must forecast around a high no-show rate.
For the traveler this cuts both ways, since a free reservation locks in a price with no obligation to keep it if the price later falls.
Rebooking when rates drop is a routine practice precisely because the industry's own booking terms permit it.
Where the posted rate ends
Airport locations carry concession fees and facility charges levied by the airport authority, which is why an off-airport branch can quote a noticeably lower total.
Additional driver fees, young driver surcharges and one-way drop charges are added after the quoted daily rate and vary by market.
Comparing the total at the end of the booking process, rather than the advertised daily figure, is the only comparison that reflects the amount paid.