We even saw late-model Mercedes for well under $100/day. Turo offers a unique selection of cars including swanky exotic ones, especially compared to traditional car rentals. Now that rentals are as low as 25% of what they were not long ago, those who bought and financed fleets of vehicles specifically for their Turo businesses, are likely going to be in trouble. But that was when rentals were regularly starting at close to $200/day. Those have been highly highly lucrative too, with Turo once saying that owners can earn more than $10k per year per vehicle as they set their own prices. Turo started with local hosts renting their own cars, but quickly morphed into a way to amass private, largely unregulated, rental car businesses. While Turo became the world’s largest peer-to-peer car rental company, like vacation rentals from Airbnb, and a fleet of over a half-million vehicles, it didn’t end there. What will become of Turo fleet hosts next? We suggest you check for yourself, however, as not all insurance companies may handle Turo similarly. Turo offers liability insurance coverage from Liberty Mutual for both parties, offering some added level of comfort. Turo Hawaii, compared with, say, Craigslist, has distinct advantages. Why do visitors rent from Turo Hawaii?Ĭar guru’s JD Power said of the Hawaii car rental situation, “It’s not very pleasant… to find out they have to pay $300 a day for a Kia.” Tourists still don’t like finding out that prices for Hawaii car rentals have gone through the roof unexpectedly.
Turo has also served as a means by which many Hawaii residents have made a little extra money (or a lot - see below), while either sharing their personal car or buying and sharing new cars with others including Hawaii visitors who are looking for at least a little better deal. That arose as rental car companies reduced their fleets by shipping them to the mainland and were then unable to buy new cars due to ship shortages and other reasons. Turo Hawaii has been one way that visitors and residents have been able to cope with the ongoing shortage of rental cars and the concomitant sky-high prices of Hawaii car rentals. Turo Hawaii has labeled this as “a front-end sales-tax loophole.” Hawaii’s car rental shortage has gone unabated. Turo owners, as consumers, however, pay over 4% general excise tax. Traditional car agencies have to date paid a 0.5% wholesale rate tax on new cars. It goes both ways, however, as there also is a big discrepancy in Hawaii taxes on purchasing cars used for rentals. At the time, Hawaii sales tax reps said it “wants to be “really, really fair with any commercial car rental operation.” Hawaii requires taxes and rental surcharges on every rental car. While it is doubtful that’ll ever pass, even according to the bill’s author, what we’ll probably see is an increase in taxes for Turo Hawaii rentals and some additional rules. The purpose of HB1500, which was introduced in January, reads that it “prohibits any person from operating, using, or controlling a peer-to-peer car-sharing program in the State.”
#AUTO SLASH PLUS#
Here are the lowest prices we found for dates of September 14–21, picked up and dropped off at airports, plus two rentals at each location that caught our eye.Ģ018 Ford EcoSport SUV $64/day Hawaii had plans to ban Turo entirely, but that never happened.Ī bill (HB1500), stuck in Hawaii legislative committee sought to stop all Turo Hawaii and other peer-to-peer car-share programs permanently.
For less than the prices we saw recently for a sub-compact, you can now rent a top-of-the-line car on Turo in Hawaii for close to the same amount. That big drop together with the excess number of Turo vehicles that are in Hawaii have crashed together to create a new paradigm. For example, on Maui an economy car for $44 or a mid-size SUV below $70 per day. We found, even at Hertz, prices this fall are way down at most locations. As that starts to return to some degree of normalcy, they’ve begun to drop prices. They had just been hand-tied due to conditions largely outside their control, including a lack of inventory. Hawaii car rental companies never planned to take Turo rentals sitting down. The cost of your Hawaii vacation is starting to look somewhat better, at least in that regard. We couldn’t believe our eyes today on the prices we found. The bottom appears to be quickly falling out on Turo Hawaii car rentals.