Use Corporate Car Rental Discounts (If You Can)

Car Rental Strategies, Car Rentals 101: Save Money and Time With Your Rental

Rental car pricing varies wildly depending on what website and what discount code you use. Most people have access to a variety of different ways to get a discount on their rentals, such as a Costco or AAA discount or a promotional discount code they find on the web. While these codes advertise 25-40% off, they typically provide a 10-20% discount off the regular rates available on online travel sites.

With the right corporate discount code, you can sometimes get extraordinary savings—up to 60-70% off the going rate.

If your company or organization has negotiated good rates with one or more rental companies and you are permitted to use them for your personal rentals, they can be an important part of your strategy for getting low rental car rates.

You need to be careful using corporate rates that you are not entitled to. If you get in an accident, insurance companies might try to use this as an excuse to not provide their usual coverage.

When normal rates are through the roof, corporate discounts can be unbelievably good. When rental demand is high and the car rental companies jack up their prices, many company's negotiated rates often stay near their normal levels. For example, in September, we looked at an 8-day rental in Orlando for the first week of Christmas break. Prices were already sky-high. A mid-size car at Avis was $864 (including all taxes and fees). Booking through Costco could get the price down to $722. With the Microsoft corporate discount, the price was only $261—a pretty good deal at any time of the year.
When rates are cheap, corporate rates may cost more. On the other hand, when demand is low and the car rental companies drop their rates to compete aggressively, a corporate discount usually isn’t better than what is available elsewhere, and might even be more expensive. When rates are super-cheap, corporate rates will almost always be higher.
The availability of great discounts can vary by car rental company. Depending on your company’s arrangements, the amount of your discount can be very different at different car rental companies. For the Christmas week example above, National offered a rate of $266, but Hertz’s rate was still $797.

Seeing if corporate rates work for you

Follow these steps:

Check to see if there are any codes you can use. If you work for a large organization, try to find out if there are negotiated discount codes and if you are allowed to use them for personal travel. If you belong to any professional organization, you can check their codes as well. There will be a different code for every car rental company that your company or organization has a relationship with.

In rare cases, you'll need to use the corporate booking tool to access your corporate car rental rates.

If you have access to codes, see how good they are. There can be a lot of difference between the discounts that are available to different organizations. Your corporate codes may not give you a better discount than you would be able to get otherwise. Or your code may be pure gold. To find out, you can try to make a couple of test reservations with your codes and see what happens (or you can wait to try them until you need to make a real reservation).
Even if you have good codes, don’t just blindly use them. When rates are low, your corporate rates can be higher. For example, for a 2-day weekend rental in Atlanta in October, the going rate for a car from Avis was $80. The Microsoft corporate rate was only $72. But the Costco rate was only $52. Furthermore, you could save even more by renting from a smaller brand. Make sure you do a little comparison shopping before you actually book with your corporate codes.
If you have good codes, use them, especially if rates are high. If the price seems high, typically over $50/day (including taxes), and you have good codes, it will almost always be worthwhile to check each of the car rental companies that your organization has a relationship with.