September’s Airport Rates Increase Highest in Two Years
Airport rates for September are up $5.48 year-over-year, the largest increase since July 2014. But the weekly rates suggest it’s not yet a guarantee that rates are on a long-term upward trend: the rates were up mid-month and then flattened out the last two weeks.
Rate data provided by Rate-Highway, a leading provider of revenue management services for the auto rental industry. Rates are an average of aggregator/OTA rates for all vendors present in the markets listed on the date of the survey. These tables and graph show the average of all base rate quotes per day for an ICAR at the six or 50 airports shown, for arrivals 15 to 21 days ahead of the date of the survey, for two- and seven-day rentals.
With the help of Jim Tennant of The Tennant Group and Michael Meyer of Rate-Highway Inc., we are conducting rate surveys on a weekly basis and providing analysis and comments where appropriate. We publish this monthly recap in our electronic edition and more comprehensive looks in the print editions.
As we saw last month, August rate quotes were up $2.81 after a year of mixed results, but this is now overshadowed by the September results, which are up $5.48 over September 2015. This is the largest year-over-year increase since the recall-induced, one-month spike of July 2014. This seems to bode well for rates in the last quarter of 2016 and hopefully early 2017.
Caution is called for, however, because the weekly trend is not as promising.
The unbroken upward weekly trend started in late July and peaked in the third week of September at $8.04 over the same week in 2015. It then dropped to $2.92, and last week was only $0.45 over the previous year.
Two weeks does not constitute a trend, but we need to see October results before being confident that rates are on a long-term upward trend. Revenue managers will have their fingers crossed!
All regions were up over last year in August and September, with the Northeast and Northwest seeing the highest rates while the Southeast had the lowest rates.
Rate data provided by Rate-Highway, a leading provider of revenue management services for the auto rental industry. Rates are an average of aggregator/OTA rates for all vendors present in the markets listed on the date of the survey. These tables and graph show the average of all base rate quotes per day for an ICAR at the six or 50 airports shown, for arrivals 15 to 21 days ahead of the date of the survey, for two- and seven-day rentals.
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