One of my least favorite parts of trip planning is booking the car rental. It’s just not very exciting. I am not a “car person” at any point in time, but especially not when it’s a car that my husband will only be driving for a short time. I want a good deal, a safe car, and some level of convenience. Even though I don’t enjoy the process, I will still try to get the best deal possible when booking a car for a trip. I don’t want to spend too many hours on this task, as there are much more satisfying aspects of trip planning. After doing this hundreds (dozens?) of times, I have a few car rental tips and tricks that I generally use.
1. Compare Prices
I like to check various sites to see what they are offering, so that I have a basis for comparison. The sites that I generally check are:
For my upcoming trip, Autoslash was significantly cheaper than all of the other sites that I checked.
2. Check any programs or organizations you are affiliated with
I am a Costco member, so I check the Costco Travel website to see what they are offering. So far, I have found Costco Travel to be significantly less expensive than most other options for my specific car rental needs.
If you are a member of an organization, like AAA or AARP, they often have some kind of car rental discounts. These are not often the best deals out there, but it is worth checking. I am a member of 2 organizations related to my professional affiliation, and I checked both of them because they have car rental (and other) discount programs. I checked all of the car rentals companies under both of the organizations for my dates, and both came back higher than both Costco and Autoslash (some actually were double the price!)
3. Search for Car Rental Discount Codes
After I have an idea of the lowest prices that are available at the websites above, I often search online for a car rental discount code. I usually google it and I also search for codes on Flyertalk on the various car rental company threads here:
4. Getting Miles & Points (and/or cashback) for Car Rentals
Sometimes it can also make sense to try to earn some miles & points for your car rentals. There are several ways to do this, although they do not always yield the biggest discounts. Some of these ways are great for business travelers who may be getting reimbursed for travel expenses (not us looking for the best deal).
- Check the website Frequent Flyer Bonuses - This site gives a comprehensive list of the airline/hotel bonuses that are being offered for various car rental companies. For example, at the time of this writing, these are the bonuses for Alamo:
- Make sure to check the shopping portals! If you aren’t sure what I mean by that, check CashBackMonitor to see if any of your preferred sites (where you are booking your car rental) are listed. Unfortunately, neither Costco Travel nor Autoslash (the 2 best prices I have found for my upcoming rental) are listed on any shopping portals. When I priced out sites that are listed (CarRentals.com, Priceline, Alamo), they were significantly more expensive, and the cash back or points did not outweigh the savings.
5. Using Miles & Points for Car Rentals
You may be wondering if you can use miles & points for your car rental. The answer is that you can! In fact, this is what I decided to do for our upcoming trip. I had 6,600 American Airlines AAdvantage miles, which is a pretty random number of miles & not good for anything else. I went to AAdvantage miles:
Click to get to the Car Rental redemptions
Before I signed in to my account, the price (in points) was 14,000 AAdvantage miles. Once I signed in, the price dropped to 6,500. I am really not sure why because I have no status at all with American Airlines. The same exact thing happened to me when I used my AAdvantage miles to book Disney hotels. So make sure you sign in! Moral of that story.
You can also use other points for car rentals, like Chase Ultimate Rewards Points, American Express Membership Rewards, or Citi Thank You Points (in addition to other airline miles).
Also, if you have a Barclaycard Arrival World Mastercard (which I wrote about here), you can reimburse yourself for the cost of your car rental if you are paying for it.
My Car Rental Research & Decision
So, as I was writing this post, I was also researching my own upcoming car rental. Keep in mind that each car reservation will be different & the best deal will not be the same from situation to situation. That’s why it is important to do your research.
This is what I found for my own upcoming trip (4 days…Tampa airport):
- Costco Travel – about $73 for an Intermediate Car from Alamo (at the airport, no shuttle)
- Autoslash – about $68 for an Intermediate Car from Advantage (off airport, would take shuttle)
- Other websites above – $90-$150 various car rental companies
- Using codes – when I put in my professional affiliation codes, the prices came back much higher ($145-$157)
- Using points – when I checked my American Airlines redemption option, I saw that I could get a Compact or Larger car for 6,500 miles
In the end, I decided to use my AAdvantage Miles because I had a very random amount of miles left in my account (6,600). Even though I originally thought I would go with Autoslash or Costco (and use my Barclaycard for reimbursement), I realized that my American Airlines miles were kinda useless at this point. So that’s what I decided. And maybe that extra cash will go toward our next trip.