I am planning to be in France in April, and looked at car hire rates on the AutoEurope website.
Having noted what the rates would be in April 2014 (& having decided that I did not wish to use Firefly), I then looked at the cost of car hire if I booked exactly the same kind of car for the same length of time for in January 2014, December 2013, and October 2013 - only a month away.
What I discovered surprised me.
Oct 2013 - £216
Dec 2013 - £221
Jan 2014 - £247
April 2014 - £247
It seemed that the further in advance one books, the more expensive car hire is - which I suspect is not actually true!
So why this curious pattern?
I have two theories.
The first is that October is a cheaper time to hire cars than April - but I can't see it being
cheaper than January.
The second is based on my observation that AutoEurope shows one which company will provide the car, and a lot of the companies (e.g. Citer, Europecar) are simply not showing up in searches for dates in 2014 - but they are for dates 2013 - which implies that they are not allowing themselves to go into AutoEurope's equation for 2014 at this stage. However, that cannot be the whole story, since Budget are showing up as cheaper for a Corsa in Oct 2013 than in Jan 2014.
Does anyone know what the reasons are?
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