A friend suggested this, and I just used it to get a good rate.
Go online, like Kayak, and enter your ideal rental. Find the cheapest rate and use that as your baseline. Poke around, see if you can get better.
Then go to a “name your own price” site, like Price Line, and offer about 1/2 of that. Your bid cost doesn’t include taxes, so that gets added on afterwards.
I went from $650 for a minivan for 8 days, using a corporate discount, to $450 after taxes, for a minivan. Since I don’t care which of the big rental companies I use, I’m happy with the outcome.
I rented a vehicle in May. The best value I got was through AAA. It started at a 30 percent discount, on top of the discounted rate from the rental company because I’m in their program.
I was given two choices in May:
[ol]
[li]Prepay a full tank (at market rates) and return the vehicle with any amount in the tank.[/li][li]Return with a full tank, or get stuck paying to fill it at double the market rate.[/li][/ol]
I prepaid, and filled the tank once. My cost at the pump was actually more expensive than the prepaid tank ( but only a few cents/gallon).
In the Caribbean I’ve been very happy renting from small, family owned/operated places that are borderline rent-a-wrecks. Very reasonable prices, and the few times we’ve had mechanical issues they arrive in minutes with a swap car. No worries about keeping sand out of the car and no problem if the top is down during a downpour.
I’ve gotten $10-a-day rates from buy-here-pay-here places near me thanks to this. Nice for in-city driving, but considering the condition of some of them, I’d be wary of relying on this for big trips or moves.
One of my other tricks is to go through the dealer/mechanic I regularly use for my main car. They often have low business-to-business rate deals with nearby renters, usually to snag cheap rentals for people getting service to their cars, but not limited to such. $15 a day for a new(-ish) sedan from a national company (Thrifty?) for a week-long vacation? I wanted to go to New Hampshire for a bit, didn’t want to rack up the miles on my car, a hefty drive from Indiana to back. Called the dealer, told them I needed a rental for a week and had them summon it. Voila! You could throw the dealer a bone and have your own car sent in for a $30 oil change while you utilize their set-up, then pick your car up when you’re done with the rental. Similarly for needing specialty vehicles (I’ve gotten pick-ups to help friends move for cheap, dropping my car off for an oil change then grabbing a truck for less than I’d have to pay a coworker to borrow one), and similar agreements probably exist with your insurance agent.
This.*
And I happen to be renting an Enterprise car right now.
And when you return the car, make sure that they’re not charging you for the coverage if you declined it earlier. That’s been a trick I’ve caught a few times.
Also, if you get a car with a half-tank of gas, make a note of it and return the car with a half-tank of gas. Don’t bring it back full, because they won’t financially comp you for the extra fuel. [The guys at my local Enterprise know me pretty well, so they will comp me 1/X of a tank on my next rental, which is pretty cool of them but I think they do it because I’m a long-time loyal customer and they know I’ll eventually be renting from them again.]
And this keeps happening to me: I reserve the lowest-priced car well in advance and for some reason it’s pretty busy when I arrive to pick up my reserved matchbox-on-wheels. Since they don’t have many cars on the lot and they don’t like to keep me waiting, they give me ‘free upgrades’ and put me in the lowest-priced car they have available – which is usually two or three categories higher than my reserved car. When I bring it back (with as much gas as it had when I left), I make a point of checking to make sure they’re only charging me for what I reserved. [They did tell me it was a free upgrade, after all!]
Oh, and reciprocate the courtesy: Tell them about any handling quirks or mechanical issues that are less than perfect. They want to know so they can take care of the matter(s) and not endanger the next driver. And if the car was less-than-perfect and you let them know, they might even give you a free upgrade or an extra quarter-tank on your next rental.
–G!
*There was a particularly windy weekend when I rented a car and decided to take the extra coverage, just in case the high winds blew a tree branch on the hood or into the roadway. Later, when some guy blazed through a yellow-going-on-red light and kicked a rock up into my windshield I took the rental back to the agency, explained the situation, and walked away paying nothing at all for the damage. Note, however, that the personal liability could still have gone on my insurance, but the damage costs were part of what I paid for with the rental fees. [Your coverage may vary, etc. etc.]
