Data revealed by the car rental comparison website DiscoverCars.com has shown a 47 per cent overall increase in the cost of car rental globally with the cost of renting a car in Ireland up by a staggering 267 per cent compared to June 2021.
According to the study, in June of last year, the average cost of renting a car in Ireland came to around €50 per day but now stands at an average of just under €185. Overall, the average cost of renting a car globally rose from €51 per day to €80 per day during the same period.
Other places which saw enormous increases include Canada (264 per cent), the Azores (224 per cent), Israel (152 per cent) and Czechia (131 per cent). Out of the 45 holiday destinations examined by the study, only four - Florida, Guadeloupe, Australia and Colorado - saw falls in the cost of car rental, while the Canary Islands, Morocco, Finland, New Zealand and the Balearic Islands only saw modest increases of 13 per cent or less. The Canaries are, say the statistics, currently the cheapest place to rent a car at an average of just under €29 per day.
"An embarrassment"
An estimated 20 per cent of visitors to Ireland hire a car on arrival, and the figures quoted by DiscoverCars more or less tally with anecdotal stories which have appeared in the media in recent weeks and months about soaring car rental costs in Ireland.
Speaking to Ocean FM in June, a former Leitrim councillor, John McCartin, said that his brother-in-law had been quoted an astounding €51,350 for car rental for nine days, branding it as "an embarrassment" to the country.
"You could buy the same car for around €45,000," said McCartin, "so clearly, we acknowledge that there are supply chain issues and there's a scarcity of cars at the moment, but clearly these companies have the policy that they are going to charge the maximum they can get from anybody who is desperate for the use of a vehicle."
"I Googled to see if you could charter a helicopter and discovered that for around 200km a day it would be in the region of €3,500, which is a far cry over nine days from €51,000 my brother was quoted for the use of a nine-seater car.
Other reports have surfaced of an American woman being quoted €10,000 for three weeks of car hire in May and a woman travelling from Turkey receiving a quote of €18,703 for one week.
In some cases, it has proven considerably cheaper for visitors to buy second-hand cars for the duration of their trips.
One Fine Gael TD, Brendan Griffin, speaking at a meeting of the Oireachtas tourism committee went so far as to accuse car rental companies such as Hertz of "economic treason".
Why have rental costs increased?
In 2020, with a complete collapse in global tourism, car rental companies around the world sold off a large chunk of their fleets in order to stay afloat. With travel restrictions relaxed across Europe and the United States, tourism has seen a huge boom with visitor numbers almost back to their pre-pandemic levels. The problem, however, is that car hire companies have not been able to replenish their depleted fleets thanks to the worldwide shortage of new cars due to supply chain issues stemming from a range of factors including semiconductor shortages and the war in Ukraine. This has resulted in a huge gap between supply and demand with consequently exorbitant prices.
Fáilte Ireland estimates that the stock level of rental cars in Ireland has halved from 30,000 in May 2019 to around 15,000 currently.
A spokesperson for Fáilte Ireland said that rental car costs were undermining Ireland's reputation as a "good value-for-money destination".
"Without an appropriate rental car fleet," she said, "Irish tourism's ability to recover is severely restricted. An under-sized car rental fleet is a material threat to the recovery of overseas tourism. International tourism demand is growing at a faster rate than Ireland's car rental operators can re-fleet."