Any tips on saving money on car rentals. I feel like I always pay about twice what I planned when I turn the car in. Going for an economy model for two weeks in Wisconsin.
I once got an amazing deal (about 70% off) simply by googling discount codes for the car rental place I was looking at. I also use Kayak.com to compare prices and find the lowest.
Rent online. I once made the mistake of thinking I’d just rent a car when I got there. It was almost three times as expensive as what I had researched.
I pulled out my phone and showed then. They were unsympathetic, and unwilling to match their own advertised price.
I stepped out of the line, reserves a car online for the original rate, then went back in line, picked up the car.
Also it surprised me that there is quite a bit of volatility in car rental prices, similar to airline fares. Book a couple of weeks out, go for a lower class of vehicle, then upgrade, often for free, when you get there.
If you go through priceline or car rental, or hotwire, low ball your first bid. They’ll continue to email you say after day, slowly lowering the price.
Check if your credit card or personal insurance provides sufficient rental car insurance. If so, you may be able to save money by declining the additional insurance from the rental company.
All Visa cards have some rental car protection. But it is a bit of hassle, you have to through your regular car insurance company forts, then Visa will pay whatever is left.
As far as actually getting an economy model…they always try to pull the bait and switch.
Seinfeld - The Car Reservation - YouTube
Also be wary of pressure to get you to buy their insurance or to upgrade to an Audi or some such.
Start your search two weeks early.
Search the rate on various rental car the companies’ own websites. Book the cheapest rate. Usually you can freely cancel without penalty and rebook for a lower fare, even with the same company. Re-check the rate every day or two.
It may not apply to the OP, but if you happen to have valid driver’s licenses from more than one country like I do then the rate you see on the rental car company’s website might be quite different depending on whether you tell them you are an international customer. Might be cheaper either way.
Now go on Hotwire and check the lowest rate. Then go on Priceline and bid a few dollars per day lower than the lowest Hotwire rate. You only get one bid per day unless you change the class of vehicle.
Re-bid on Priceline daily. Cancel the rental car company website booking if you get your Pirceline bid accepted.
I followed this process for a booking in Orlando (tons of rental cars!) and dropped the base rate from about $24/day to $6/day. You may not get such a great deal in Wisconsin where there is less competition, but you should be able to do better than the first price you see.
Make sure you fill the tank right before returning the car. They may require you to also show the receipt.
All good advice above. I have found that it’s only worth checking Dollar and Enterprise; in any given area, one will be in the bottom 10%. (The other, oddly, will be upper mid-tier…)
Most other prices that seem lower turn out to be teasers or misleading… f’rex, MANY of the bigger names don’t bundle in the considerable taxes and fees until final checkout.
Book in advance. Say no to any counter upsell… Because if they’re trying to get you to take a bigger or cushier car, it may be all they have and you’ll get it anyway. Plan to bring it back with a full tank and say no, No, NO to all fuel deals.
Check for rentals places away from the airports. The airport franchises often have the highest prices. It might be worth it to take a taxi to a downtown rental office.
Dollar/Thrifty usually has the best rates. My last trip to MSP, they didn’t have the full-sized vehicle I reserved, so they upgraded me to an SUV. I think the total was about $240 for four days. Fooking taxes really add on the dollars.
Thanks for all the great suggestions!
Definitely. When my wife rents in Philadelphia she takes a train to the suburbs and rents there. Often small suburban car rental places will pick you up at a train station.
She has also found that rental rates can vary widely. If there is no penalty for cancellation, reserve early and keep going back to check the rates. If they go down, reserve, then cancel the old ones.
I’ve gotten some pretty insane car rental deals through Costco.
I’ve also gotten some good deals with http://www.rentalcarmomma.com/ (yeah, it’s got a funny name, but it’s legit).
[ul]
[li]Are you a AAA member? If so, you can take advantage of AAA discounts. If you are an AAA+ member, you get free Hertz Gold membership, and more discounts.[/li][li]Are you a Costco member? If so, there are discounts.[/li][li]Are you a member of something else? If so, there are discounts.[/li][li]Are you flying in and renting from the airport? Bummer. If you rent off-airport you shouldn’t have to pay the hidden airport fees.[/li][li]Does your homeowner’s insurance cover car rentals costs? If so, you can decline the insurance the car rental folks offer. But be aware about potential liability because most homeowner’s insurance doesn’t have adequate liability coverage.[/li][li]Be aware some rentals offer the chance to pay for a full tank of gas and return it in any condition with no extra charges. It may be cheaper, but be careful. If you make a mistake you could find you’re paying three, four, five times the cost of a gallon of gas because you did not return with a full tank.[/li][li]Don’t buy the GPS addon. If you have a decent smartphone, use its GPS.[/li][/ul]
Renting off-airport can eliminate a lot of fees, but it’s never actually been convenient for me to do so.
Employers will sometime have corporate rates negotiated. They may let employed use them for personal rentals.
These discounts tend to be taken from the top-tier prices and can be beaten in other ways. I don’t think I’ve ever used a AAA discount that saved more than nickels; the discount price was higher than other tier prices.
Unless you have someone to pick you up and drop you off, the extra costs of most airport locations are offset by cab or shuttle costs. Not usually worth the hassle UNLESS someone can provide the transportation.
I wouldn’t rely on this. It’s your car insurance, then credit card coverage, then whatever “special waiver” insurance they try to sell you. One thing taking the agency insurance gets is a free pass on all dents and dings; they won’t inspect the car going out and won’t care about dings coming in. It still doesn’t usually make $20-25 a day worth it - and be sure to do a slow walkaround of the car before you drive way, and get all bumps, scratches etc. noted, or you could get (heh) dinged for them.
All gas deals are bad ones. Period. Bring it back full or filled to the specified mark, and keep the receipt from five miles away or less. Fuel deals are for suckers and those who (have to, or think they have to) drop the car off at high speed on the way to their gate. Bad choice for everyone else.
This. You can buy a dashboard GPS for less than what they charge for a week’s rental. Bring your own, use your phone or do without.
Unless there are five people in your party or you are carrying a ton of luggage, many airports have reasonable public transportation options which can get you close to a rental agency for a lot less than the markup on a single day. You need to find one in advance and see if they have pickup.
For a day or two the hassle is probably not worth it, for a week it often is.
If you really want to save some money, some used car lots have rental car side businesses. Often this is through a Rent-a-Wreck franchise, but some lots just do it independently. The cars aren’t going to be practically-new like the ones from the big rental companies, but they’re still usually only a few years/a few tens of thousands of miles old.
They’re not going to be listed on the travel aggregator sites, so you need to make some calls. They’re also obviously not at the airport but the couple of times I’ve used them they’ve picked me up.
As others have mentioned, use the multi-quote sites (Kayak, Orbitz) to get a sense of who’s more or less expensive in the area. Then go to the individual companies’ sites and get a quote directly. Many of them will have special offers or rated available at the homepage. A couple of times I’ve been surprised by having “majors” undercut “bargain” renters once the specials are accounted for. Reserve the best no-cancellation-penalty rate you can early and then see if you can beat it later.
Today virtually all respectable rental companies will early in the quote process let you know how much is the amount plus taxes and fees, which is important, you can EASILY double or more the rate with taxes and fees. Then you may start adding up options.
One important item that pops up ever more often these days are e-tolls or “plate tolls” – in some locations the toll highway operators are doing away with cash tolls altogether, so it’s not just a matter of exact change any more, now you have to pay the toll via a radio tag (a la EZ Pass) or through a license plate number/barcode-recognition system. In other places it’s still an option to pay cash but in both cases if you do not have a tollpass system in place and you drive through the tollpass lane you end up being charged the tolls plus a steep admin fee. The various companies have different set-ups for how to handle this. In areas where it’s still the standard to use cash tolls, you normally get an opt-in choice to use the toll pass, BUT if you use it even once, you will be charged for its use for the whole rental period, a fixed daily “rent” (sometimes up to a maximum) plus actual tolls. Other companies require no active choosing at rental time and just going through the tollpass lane once constitutes by itself the opting-in. Others (Dollar) add higher fixed daily amount for the duration of the rental up front (obviously estimating that you will not reach that much in real tolls since you will not be driving the same distances every single day).
Agree that the prepaid fuel option is not a good deal for almost all travelers. One can do minimal research to figure fueling stations within 5 miles of the car rental station and even if prices near the airport are to the higher end of the range it’s almost certainly cheaper than the rental company’s assigned price.
ALways check if your existing insurance will cover for the rental on the liability/damages/uninsured motorist side; some credit cards even offer primary coverage on the “damage waiver” which is usually a high charge. Use the cell phone camera to record the condition of the car upon pickup and dropoff.
One that I don’t think has been mentioned: if your credit card has a rewards program where you can redeem points for gift certificates, rental car companies often participate in these programs, sometimes for as high as 50% discounts.