Recession makes car hire a pain in Spain
Thursday, August 13, 2009 @ 1:19 PM
As if the euro exchange rate wasn’t enough to make holidaymakers hot under the collar, sunseekers are now spluttering into their sangria at the soaring cost of hiring a car in many of Europe’s top resorts.
Prices at some resorts in Spain during the peak school holiday period have doubled amid a scarcity of cars and many people arriving at their destinations without having pre-booked are finding that a number of companies have sold out of vehicles.
Experts said that the credit crunch had hit many car hire operators, particularly smaller local companies, which would normally use finance deals to buy new cars and sell their older cars in the second-hand market. The result is a basic model that might have cost £200 last year can now cost as much as £400.
The difficulty of securing finance for new cars and the dearth of buyers for second-hand cars in some countries has resulted in many operators failing to renew their vehicles and ending up with smaller fleets of increasingly decrepit cars. The incidence of firms going out of business has also jumped.
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