Renting a car in Armenia may cost you more than buying one. Since I am planning to do lots of traveling within Armenia when I visit her at the end of this month, I have been looking into renting a car so I can drive it all around the place including to Artsakh.

Renting a car for my 17-day stay will cost me more than my expensive airline ticket. I am not kidding.  The rates of car rental in Armenia are absolutely ridiculous.

I am not sure what is the reason for the rocket high prices, but it seems the fact that locals don’t rent cars contributes to the problem.  But even so, it seems the local rentals want to do nothing than rip off Diasporan Armenians and foreign tourists.

Rates at http://www.kayak.com/?tab=cars&location=Yerevan&gclid=CMH4j7KEnI0CFQqgYgodvw-A6A, for example, are scary.  But not as scary when you check out the Hertz prices.

Actually, I first learned about Hertz cars through www.hertz.am, their local website in Armenia.  I was happy to find out that they rented Nissan Pathfinder, for example, for $20 a day! Actually my sister (you can tell she is an investigative journalist) happened to visit the location in Armenia yesterday to double check the availability, prices and conditions. 

She was told there that hertz.am is out of date and that it is not $20/day at all!  For 17 days, she was told it would be a little over $1,800.  Can you imagine?  Over $100 for a car per day?  When I first heard of this I thought they were ripping off.  I ended up playing with the main Hertz website – www.hertz.com – and found out that actually the price my sister was quoted was $200 less than what hertz.com had it listed.  Yes, over $2,000 for a car for 17 days in Armenia!

This is ridiculous.  How do they expect people to want to travel to Armenia? 

Anyhow. I am making an offer.  If you live in Yerevan and have a normal autmomatic car WITH air conditioner I would like to rent it from you for a total $350, ok maybe even $400 for 17 days.

If you don’t live in Yerevan but will do everything to help me :d send me a check of $1,800 so I can rent a car – or maybe even buy one. 

If I had won the lottery (which I don’t play in the first place), I would buy one of these Infiniti SUVs, ship it to Armenia then leav it for my sister there after my visit.  Especially that she wants to move to a remote Armenian region to develop the local media there, this would be a great investment toward her efforts.  As the Russian saying goes, “Doesn’t hurt to dream.”