If you live in the Northeast and you're planning on renting a car today to meet up with friends or loved ones for Thanksgiving, you're probably out of luck. Superstorm Sandy has created a massive rental car shortage due to thousands of cars being damaged less than a month ago.
Thanksgiving is usually one of the busiest times of the year for car rental companies like Enterprise and Hertz, and annually comes second only to Christmas. The holiday week has been a strange one however as most car rental companies don't currently have any cars in stock to rent out.
"Showing up to Thanksgiving in a U-Haul is worse than showing up with an escort. But at $19 a day, it's tempting," said Rosenfeld, CEO of TeamLauncher.com, an outsourcing company based in Miami to the Associated Press.
Thousands of people in the Northeast completely lost their vehicles during the deadly storm for many different reasons. This forced residents in states like New York and New Jersey to resort to other options for vehicle transportation until figuring out how they're going to replace their cars. Rental companies have been the primary solution for most suffering citizens and companies have been doing all they can to help people out.
Some companies have gone as far as driving thousands of extra models in from all over the country to help insure they'll have enough cars for at least for those who have no other option for the time being. This means that families that were looking to rent a car to make a day trip somewhere on Thanksgiving are not exactly high on the priority list for rental companies.
Hertz is a prime example of a company who has done much more than they had to in an effort to help victims out. By holding on to older vehicles that were supposed to be sold off at the end of October, they have been able to assist many suffering families.
They have also brought in extra cars that they weren't scheduled to get, and rented trailers and generators to keep open many locations that were impacted by the storm.
"It's an unusual situation," said Neil Abrams of the Abrams Consulting Group, which focuses on the car rental industry to the Associated Press. "Unfortunately, you can't go out and buy cars for a demand spike. You don't know how long it will last."
Insurance companies like Progressive, State Farm, and Nationwide told the Associated Press that they received over 38,000 car-damage claims just a couple of days after the Sandy hit the Northeast.
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