Rental Car Gouging

[MerryHolidays]

8. There are all sorts of Covid-related distortions going on

I will list just a few that I personally have experienced just in the past few days:

-many service providers have moved to chat-only customer service. I am fine with this as an option, as chat-based customer service is often fine. But, it doesn't work well for all circumstances.

-rental cars are clearly more expensive now than they were before the pandemic. As others have noted, Hawaii actually got to the point where tourists were renting U-Haul trucks as a surrogate. I just priced some rental cars in SoCal, and they are far more expensive now than normally.

-used car prices have been through the roof. We are considering selling our car and are getting several thousand dollars more today for the car than we used to. This is after the car has aged more than 1.5 years and has several thousand more miles on it today than it did when we first got offers.

-we recently helped a relative book an international business class air ticket. The price was just ok, but the airline allowed only one bag. To get a second bag, you'd have to pay several hundred dollars more. Pre-pandemic, that was unheard of, particularly in the business class sector.

-room cleaning in hotels. Pre-pandemic, it occurred every day. During the pandemic, it has decreased markedly to one or two times a week in most of the hotels I've stayed. Whether this becomes the new normal remains to be seen.

Frankly speaking, we are still smack-dab in the middle of the pandemic, so it's too soon to say. But I do wonder whether companies are going to use the changes that have arisen over the last 1.5 years to cut costs/increase profits once the pandemic subsides.