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Airport Rates Continue Upward Trend in August

August airport rates were up $3.45 over last year. Hurricane Harvey’s devastation will have a major effect on the Texas vehicle rental industry, but it didn’t significantly affect rates in August.

by Staff
September 5, 2017
Airport Rates Continue Upward Trend in August

Rate data provided by Rate-Highway, a provider of revenue management services for the auto rental industry. Rates are a monthly average of weekly surveys of aggregator/OTA rates for vendors present in the markets listed on the date of the survey. These tables and graph show the average of all daily base rate quotes for an ICAR at the 50 largest U S airports weighted by deplanements, for arrivals 15 to 21 days ahead of the date of the survey, for two- and seven-day rentals.

2 min to read


The year-over-year increase is down from June and July, but it was still up $3.45 in August. The deseasonalized average of $51.81 is back to about the May level, but it’s still up from the September 2015 to November 2016 average of about $47. Industry fleet sizes continue to be in line with demand and there is reason for optimism in the near future.

The terrible devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey in the Houston area will have a major effect on the Texas vehicle rental industry for some time to come, but it did not seem to significantly affect the August quotes. The first serious threat and evacuation warnings started the week of Aug. 21, so the hurricane would have affected the Aug. 25 rate quotes.

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The Southwest region, including Texas, was up $1.30, the lowest of the five regions. We also looked at the weekly quotes in July and August for all of Texas and for Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport. The Texas average is weighted by deplaning passenger volume. The largest year-to-year change seems to have been caused by a drop in the third week of July last year, unrelated to Hurricane Harvey.

In the last weekly survey, taken between 9:00 and 9:30 a.m. PDT on Sep. 1, no two-day rates (only seven-day rates) showed up for Hertz, Dollar, or Thrifty at any of the Texas airports in the top 50, except Dollar and Thrifty in Austin, which are not corporate-owned.

Rate data provided by Rate-Highway, a provider of revenue management services for the auto rental industry. Rates are a monthly average of weekly surveys of aggregator/OTA rates for vendors present in the markets listed on the date of the survey. These tables and graph show the average of all daily base rate quotes for an ICAR at the 50 largest U S airports weighted by deplanements, for arrivals 15 to 21 days ahead of the date of the survey, for two- and seven-day rentals.

Jim Tennant of The Tennant Group and Michael Meyer of Rate-Highway Inc. have been conducting rate surveys on a weekly basis and providing analysis and comments where appropriate. They publish this monthly recap in our electronic edition and more comprehensive looks in the print editions.

Weekly rate surveys of the top 50 U.S. airports have been conducted since mid-May 2013, so now there are four full years of history. This month, The Tennant Group and Rate-Highway are able to show results with the seasonal component adjusted.

They are also changing the way they calculate the monthly average quote from the weekly averages. In the future, all months will have the same number of weeks each year, and they have adjusted prior months to reflect this change.

Click here for a detailed description of the changes available for downloading.

Please contact Jim Tennant of The Tennant Group, jim@tennantgroup.com, 707-287-1311, with questions.


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