Finding a rental car in Cayman at the moment can be challenging, as the islands’ border reopening brings in an influx of tourists who are snapping up vehicles.
Calls to all the major rental firms on island over the weekend found that most were unable to supply vehicles at short notice, as their cars were booked.
Since Cayman eased restrictions on unvaccinated children visiting here, lifted a requirement for post-arrival COVID testing and welcomed back flights from more airlines from the US, planes filled with tourists have been landing, and those passengers are looking for vehicles in which to explore the island.
Jordyn Foster, manager of Avis, said the company had seen a big increase in the number of tourists renting cars, to the point where there have been weeks recently when the stock was sold out, including this week.
“There’s been a pretty big influx already,” Foster said. “Once [restrictions] are dropped completely, we should start to see it building back up even more.”
She said some of the bookings were being made at short notice and, in some cases, “people have been calling every week for the past two years” to check on bookings they made in 2020 and had been unable to take up.
Almost as soon as government lifted the regulations that curtailed families with young children who could not get vaccinated from travelling here, the numbers of people booking cars started growing, Foster said.
During the pandemic, the company, as it does regularly, had fleet sales, selling some of its car inventory, but it also brought new vehicles on island.
“We watched the whole situation and we timed it accordingly. We’re doing OK with our fleet, and we’ve purchased more cars,” she said, though acknowledged that Avis, like others, is experiencing some supply chain issues.
In the past, Avis has rented cars on a daily basis to cruise tourists who take vehicles to explore the island during the hours they are on shore. With the return of cruise tourists on the horizon, Foster said the company would assess if it would resume that service.
Over at Hertz, general manager Joshua Richards says business is “booming”.
“We’re pretty much sold out for March and April,” he said, adding that, as well as tourists returning in big numbers, a film crew on island had also hired out several of the company’s vehicles.
He said Hertz had recently bought 30 new Kia vehicles and a couple of Jeeps, and would get more if they were available. “Our biggest struggle in the next year is there will not be enough cars to go around; the whole island is feeling that,” he said.
While the island was closed to tourists, Hertz sold about 150 of its vehicles as part of its regular fleet sales, Richards said.
He added that since cruise ship passengers make up such a small segment of the company’s customers – and picking them up and dropping them off at the ship is time consuming – it’s unlikely the company will be focussing on renting to them.
Richards described how the return of United Airlines and American Airlines to the island last month had made a large and immediate impact on car-rental bookings.
“The weekend United flew back in was the first really busy weekend we’d had in a long time,” he said.
United arrived at Owen Roberts International Airport on Saturday, 12 Feb., for the first time in two years. Five days later, on 17 Feb., American Airlines resumed its flights to Cayman.
“The lifting of restrictions had a really good impact on people coming in,” Richards said.
In fact, since regulations were amended to allow young children to travel on their parents’ vaccination status, more and more families have been arriving, he said, adding, “We’ve been buying lots of car seats.”
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