I really dislike fees. Y’know, the kind that companies try to slip in at the very last second, hoping you won’t notice - y’know, the extra nickel or dime you’d already earmarked but which somebody else is determined to cruelly pry from your fingers.

Rental car companies are terrible about this. Local and state taxes, refueling fees, facility fees, and on and on; such charges can increase the cost of a rental by 100% or more. Ouch!

Airports, in particular, tend to levy extraordinarily high fees on car rentals. The most recent statistics I can find come from 2005 (see this study by Travelocity) and indicate that at that time, up to 66% of rental fees at airports were composed of fees alone, and that these fees were on the rise.

Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport is cited as the worst offender and is responsible for the inexcusable 66% figure mentioned above. Dallas/Fort Worth is not far behind, with fees of about 61%. Phoenix and Austin Bergstrom hover around 50%. All in all, there were, as of 2005, ten airports in the nation where consumers paid at least 39% in car rental fees. (A lot of them were in Texas. Looks like hats and churches aren’t the only things that are bigger there.)

Now, these fees are not all directly airport-related, but there’s no question that airport rentals come with the highest fees. Airport rental fees are typically not the responsibility of car rental companies themselves, but are levied by local governments to finance various projects taxpayers otherwise couldn’t be convinced to support. Local residents see taxes such as these as having the greatest effect on out-of-towners who, of course, have no say in the decision-making process. How convenient!

If you’re booking online with, say, Yahoo! Travel, it’s fairly easy to research in advance the exact amount of taxes and fees you’ll need to pay. Let’s take a look at the taxes and fees on a hypothetical week-long rental of an economy car at the Phoenix airport. The cost of the rental itself is $84 with Payless. Sounds pretty good, eh? Not when the following fees are factored in:

That’s right, the car rental itself costs $84 and the taxes and fees total $66.29, comprising a whopping 44% of the total rental cost ($150.29).

I wanted to know if it would be cheaper to rent outside of the airport, so I did a bit of research. As it turns out, taxes and fees are much lower outside of the airport, but the cars themselves tend to cost more! The cheapest rental I could find outside of the airport in Phoenix runs $125 a week, plus $23.19 in taxes and fees for a grand total of $148.19 - $2.10 cheaper than renting at the airport. The whole concept would be that you could take a taxi or shuttle into town to save on the airport-related fees, but you’d clearly have to pay more than $2.10 to get into town (alright, unless you could take a bus, but even in this case the savings would be miniscule and probably not worth the trouble).

This isn’t only the case in Phoenix. I tried researching airport vs. in-town rentals in several other cities, including Kansas City and Dallas, all with the same result: the airport had higher fees, but renting there was still cheaper or about the same overall. Looks like you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t! Results may vary in some locations, so I definitely encourage you to do your own research before concluding that it isn’t worth it to take alternate transportation to a rental location in town.

I believe this situation is the way it is because the large amount of competition at airports ultimately makes up for the huge taxes on rentals there. If only politicians would quit levying these “tourist taxes,” it’d actually be a lot cheaper in most cases to rent at airports!

The lesson here is that, although it might upset you that 50% of your rental cost is made up of miscellaneous taxes and fees which you weren’t informed about until the last possible second, you’re generally better off buckling down and shelling out. This is not advice I enjoy giving. I’m sorry that I can’t offer some clever, original solution and am left to report this unsavory conclusion. I feel like I’m advocating Satanism or something, because I really hate those fees. But until those politicians wise up, we’ve got no choice… and let’s not hold our breath for that!

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