It was the Rental Car Apocalypse.
For Thursday and much of Friday, no rental cars were available at any local agency for love or money.
Well, if you had enough money you could rent a car from St. Louis Exotics, a branch of Enterprise Rent-A-Car. The Ladue location offered what it calls Super Sports Cars — a Maserati Ghibli or a Mercedes E-Class Coupe, for instance — for $279.99 per day.
Range Rover and similar SUVs cost a little more.
But otherwise, even love couldn’t get you a car — though some became available late Friday afternoon.
U-Haul was out of pickup trucks. But if you absolutely, positively needed a mode of transportation and you didn’t particularly care what it looked like, you could rent one of their moving vans. Not only could you have a vehicle, it came with at least 402 cubic feet of hauling space.
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Demand for rental cars has been strong all summer and into September, said Michael Wilmering, public relations manager for Enterprise, which also owns National Car Rental and Alamo Rent A Car.
The St. Louis rental car locations were hit particularly hard this week by the Love Life Women’s Conference of the Joyce Meyer Ministries, which is being held Thursday through Saturday at The Dome at America’s Center.
Jeremiah Matthews, a sales agent at the St. Louis Lambert International Airport location of Dollar Rent A Car, said that office rented a large number of cars to people attending the conference. The ministry is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year.
Rental-car sellouts are not uncommon, said Breana Conner-Haynes, another sales agent at the airport location of Dollar Rent A Car. They may happen as often as twice a month. Typically, weekdays are busier than weekends, she said.
When flash floods destroyed so many private cars in August, rental car agencies sold out quickly and for some time, she said.
The industry was hit hard by the coronavirus in 2020, when travel largely came to a halt. Rental car companies severely cut back on their new fleet purchases that year, and they were caught without enough cars when travel picked up again in 2021 and into this year.
According to an article in Barron’s, “companies’ fleet sizes depleted due to problems securing new vehicles after an early pandemic selloff.”
Wilmering said that Enterprise has seen “significant improvement” in rebuilding its fleet, compared to last year. Now, the problem is the global shortage of microchips necessary for today’s cars and other supply chain issues that is limiting the availability of new cars, he said in the statement.
In order to assure that a car is there when you need it, he said, make a reservation as early as possible.
But sometimes, even a reservation won’t help.
Brandon Galloway flew from Houston to St. Louis Friday to attend a wedding in Mount Vernon, Illinois. He had a reservation with National Car Rental for three months. But his flight was delayed.
He got in contact with the rental car company, which told him it would hold his reservation for 24 hours. Anything longer than that, and the reservation would end.
A few hours later, he was about to board his plane at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston.
“I looked at my app to see what my reservation number was. The reservation was no longer there,” he said. Not only that, the company had no record of his ever having one, though he could prove that he did.
He tried all the other rental-car companies in town and discovered that they were sold out.
Finally, he said, “I went through Priceline and booked one through Avis.”
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