One way car rental in Norway

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Most travel pricing these days is based on supply and demand and not on actual cost. The exact same airplane seat, car, or hotel room can vary by a LOT depedning on what the provider thinks they can get. I've seen a the price for a regular Holiday Inn that typically costs around $100/night go up to over $1500 (that's a factor of over 15!)

There is not a whole lot a you can do about it other than "shopping around". Try different dates, different providers and or/different locations.

Unfortunately, there is no rhyme or reason for pricing, so "trial and error" is the way to go. Some things that I have observed

  1. Sometimes picking up a car in town is much cheaper than picking it up in the airport.
  2. Local providers can be much cheaper than the big chains (observed in Mexico, Iceland). This might be tricky with one way, though.
  3. A 4 day rental can be substantially cheaper than a 3 day rental. You just have to make sure that there is no "early return penalty" that some companies actually do have (observed in Germany & Netherlands).
  4. Go through a third party provider (observed in Germany). Last time in Germany I went with check24.de which was less than half the price than booking the same car on Enterprise's website. Given the massive price difference I was worried about this, but it went great: Enterprise even had my frequent driver number on the booking and gave my a nice upgrade.

Just one more example on how crazy this all is: I had rented a car for about 10 days or so and needed to extend it by a single day. The provider quoted a price for this extra day that was extortionary high. Fortunately I was at some point close to the rental place so I just dropped it off a few days early and managed to get a refund for the remaining days. This refund more than paid for new rental with a different provider that included the extra day. So I ended up with a "free" extension, more money in my pocket and a nicer car.

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