Do better-rated car hire brands charge more?

By the DayRunner team · 7 November 2026

Better-rated car hire brands did price a bit higher, but the link was weak. Across 220 brands with 100 or more reviews at 18 airports, the rank correlation between customer rating and price index was 0.38. Most of it came from the bottom: brands rated under 7 out of 10 priced a median 41% under the market. From 7.0 to 8.4, price hardly changed with rating.

This is one Rate Pulse snapshot of rentalcars.com, 7 Nov 2026, in a November shoulder period. It shows ratings and prices together on one day. It can't show that a better rating causes a higher price, or the other way round.

How we got these numbers

• One snapshot: rentalcars.com search results, searched from New Zealand, swept 6 to 7 Nov 2026 (NZ time).
• 3-day hires picked up at the airport on each of 14 days, 8 to 21 Nov 2026. Daily rate = 3-day total ÷ 3, in NZD.
• Price index = the brand's median daily rate ÷ the market median, for the same car type and pick-up day. 1.00 is level with the market.
• Rating is the rentalcars.com customer rating out of 10, as shown on the airport dashboards. We don't check those reviews.
• Only brands with 100 or more reviews and 10 or more offers are in. That's 220 of the 264 brand listings across 18 airports.
• Correlation is Spearman's rank correlation: 1 means the higher-rated brand is always dearer, 0 means no link, -1 means always cheaper. Pearson's correlation gave much the same answer, 0.37.
• Advertised prices, not what brands earned. Full method: How Rate Pulse works.

Price index by rating band, all 18 airports

The big step is between the bottom band and the rest. After that, the median moves from 0.96 to 1.08 across three bands, and the top band is a touch cheaper than the one below it.

By airport

Rank correlation for each airport with at least 5 brands that passed the filters. With so few brands per airport, these numbers are noisy.

Bali had only one brand that passed the filters, so it's left out.

Plenty of brands break the pattern

• 14 of the 220 brands were rated 8.5 or higher and priced at least 10% under the market.
• 6 were rated under 7.5 and priced at least 10% over it.

The value-for-money sub-score, which you might expect to track price most closely, had an even weaker link to price index: a rank correlation of 0.21.

What stands out

The four strongest links were all at European airports: London, Dublin, Athens and Madrid, each above 0.6.

At Melbourne and Sydney the link ran slightly the other way. Better-rated brands were, if anything, a touch cheaper. At Bangkok there was no link.

The New Zealand airports sat in the middle, between 0.21 and 0.32.

What operators can take from it

• Don't assume a good rating earns a premium. In this snapshot, a brand rated 8.0 to 8.4 priced about the same as one rated 7.0 to 7.9.
• A very low rating went with very low prices. Brands under 7 sat a median 41% below market. That's the group a low-rated brand sits with on price.
• Check your own airport. The link was strong in London and Dublin and absent in Melbourne, Sydney and Bangkok.
• Use rating and price together when you pick your competitive set. A cheap, well-rated brand is a different threat from a cheap, poorly rated one. See competitive set.

Questions

Sources

1. Rate Pulse sweep of rentalcars.com, 7 Nov 2026
2. Rate Pulse: London Heathrow
3. Rate Pulse: Dublin
4. Rate Pulse: Athens
5. Rate Pulse: Melbourne
6. Rate Pulse: Sydney
7. Rate Pulse: Bangkok
8. How Rate Pulse works