Florida Homes & Travel

The tumbling value of the pound against a strengthening Dollar has had a very immediate effect on the price of car hire in Florida and the rest of the U.S. Whilst the cost of fuel cut bottom lines for providers this summer and started the thought processes running, it was the falling pound which concentrated the mind completely and has forced a huge increase in basic car costs which has all but wiped out the pound by pound reductions that we have seen over the last 3 years.

The hikes are a combination of the providers needing to increase the rate charged for their cars to cover increased costs such as fuel and insurance; and UK suppliers needing to increase the Sterling rate to counteract the Dollar rate they pay providers. Unfortunately, rates for all 4 main companies increased with only a couple of days notice, and this did not allow us to give a warning to anyone other than those we were immediately dealing with. Dollar and Thrifty led the charge, prices were increased on the 1st October just days after we went to press, Alamo waited a couple of weeks, at one point we thought the rates might last until the end of the year, but when Sterling lost another 7 cents against the Dollar, the rates came in almost overnight! Likewise Budget, initially a heads up for the end of the year, but once it was clear that the others had gone up, Budget saw no reason to hang about and put the prices up in short shift. On a smaller scale I was also forced to increase U-Save rates for the same reason of the falling pound.
The new rates have completely re-written the face of car hire in Florida, and significantly increased the costs of vacationing there. If flight prices also increase as many predict, a Florida holiday could come to be seen more as that ‘trip of a lifetime’ rather than a regular destination - almost as cheap as Europe as it had become.

Posted on 25 November 2008