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  Car Rental Strategies

Unfortunately, there is no perfect website to find the lowest car rental rates. Your strategy depends on the amount of time you want to spend, the discounts you are entitled to, and whether rental rates are relatively expensive, or inexpensive, at the time you need the car.

Get cheaper rates by using smaller car rental companies

Many people avoid smaller car rental companies, but we recommend taking advantage of renting from them, when their prices are significantly lower than what you can get at the larger companies. In most cases, their airport locations are essentially as convenient as their bigger brethren. While their cars are often, but not always, a bit older and more worn-down, they usually still provide reliable transportation.

• The cheapest rates are almost always at smaller car rental companies. You usually won’t find the best rates from Avis, Hertz, and National, or even from their somewhat smaller brethren, like Alamo or Budget. Instead, the very best rates are likely to be from much smaller companies like E-Z Car Rentals or Ace Rent a Car. For example:
• A Christmas week rental in Orlando from Avis or Hertz is around $400. You can get the price down to around $300, by taking advantage of discounts. But a mid-size rental with Economy Rent-a-car, for the same week, is only $132. 
• A weekend rental on a less busy weekend in San Diego might cost around $145 with the big-name companies, or about $100 with a good discounted rate. However, you can rent a car with several smaller companies for only about $55.
• A one-day rental on a busy weekday in Dallas might cost $80, or $70 with a discounted rate. However, you can rent a car from smaller companies for about $50.  
• If you want to find rates for smaller car rental companies, you are going to have to search on an online travel site like Expedia or Kayak.com. Many of the more specialized car rental sites (described below) don’t search the little guys.

It doesn’t make much difference which online travel site you use. We compared a handful of sites like Expedia, Travelocity, carrentals.com, and rentalcars.com, and in almost all cases, they returned essentially the same prices. Perhaps that comes as no surprise, as Expedia owns many of them.


• On average, you can expect more hassles at check-in. Some locations try to make up for their low rates with aggressive sales pushes. In addition, you may need to spend more time inspecting the car for damage, and there are no "choose your car" programs to take advantage of. One more warning. AutoSlash, one of our favorite car rental resources, specifically recommends avoiding Payless.
• The biggest downside of smaller companies is that they don’t have many off-airport locations. This makes it harder to take advantage of tactics that avoid airport taxes, or deal with a car that is having problems.

Getting discounted rates with larger car rental companies

If the discount you can get for renting with a smaller company is not that significant, you have a strong preference for a bigger brand, you need a car at a “neighborhood” location, or you are trying to take advantage of a free-rental-day or loyalty program promotion, you’ll need to find the best rate with one of the larger car rental companies.

• You’ll never find a great rate for larger companies on websites like Expedia or Kayak. Most online travel agents and aggregators only search the regular rates, not the special discounted rates that are widely available for car rentals. A quick search on these sites is a great way to see if there are any good options from smaller companies, and get a feel for which of the larger companies is likely to have the best rates for your upcoming trip, but it is rarely a good way to book a car with one of the major car rental companies.
• Autoslash is a bit of a pain to use, but often finds the best rates. We recommend always checking Autoslash when you are shopping for a car rental. It searches a wide variety of discount and coupon codes across a number of sites to try to find the lowest rate. That often means that your rate already includes a coupon code, and you won’t be able to add an additional coupon after you book.

In most cases, Autoslash winds up finding the cheapest rates for most of our rentals, but don't count on it always being lower than what you can find elsewhere, even for sites that it purports to search. Nevertheless, if you are going to search only one site, make it Autoslash.



Unlike most other websites, Autoslash doesn't show you your rates right away. Instead, you fill out the rental information, and they will send you an email a few minutes later. When you click on a link in the email, you'll visit a webpage that shows your rates (for the specific car size you asked for) from a number of different rental car companies.

If you want to make a reservation, you can access the discounted rates that Autoslash found via Priceline. This may seem confusing, because while you book through Priceline, the rates are the ones that Autoslash found, not the normal rates you would find if you went to Priceline directly. Rest assured that Autoslash isn't just a front-end to the Priceline website. Also, while it says "Pay at Counter" that usually translates to paying when you drop off your car.

In many cases, you'll also have the option of booking an even cheaper rate directly through Autoslash. For these "Pay Now" rates, you'll need to pay in full when you make the reservation, but you can cancel or change the reservation up to 48 hours before pick-up. This is much better than a typical non-refundable rate. On these reservations, you won't be able to add your frequent renter number to the reservation. While you can add it at the counter when you arrive, or with National at the exit gate after you choose your car from the Emerald Aisle, this is a little inconvenient.

Regardless of how you book, Autoslash will keep trying to get you a lower rate. If so, you'll get a notification, so that you can save even more money.

• On average, Costco offers the best generally available discounts, and its site is easy to use. If you are a Costco member, their website is often the best place to go for a US or Canadian reservation (other than Autoslash). Their rates are generally better than what you can get with AAA, AARP, or other widely-available discounts codes. And they let you easily search Alamo, Avis, Budget, and Enterprise using a single search. 


Sometimes their rates can be ridiculously low. For example, for a recent weekend rental in San Diego, the normal rate was around $145. Discounted rates were around $100. But, Costco’s rate for an Avis rental was only $35.

• The other widely available options for discounted rates are about the same. We found the discount rates available from Groupon tend to be a bit better than those from the Entertainment Book, AARP, BJs, AAA, or the car rental company’s loyalty program. However, on any given reservation, any given code can bring up the lowest rate, and if you are willing to spend the time, it can be worthwhile checking multiple codes.

Unfortunately, checking these rates can be time consuming.  You can check BJs and AAA rates on their websites. But for Groupon, AARP, the Entertainment Card, and each rentals company’s member rates, you need to individually check each car rental company and code combination. 

Our approach is to use a quick search on an online travel site (like Expedia) to narrow down the list of companies we check to only those with the lowest “regular” prices. For example, if a search on Expedia shows the lowest rates on Alamo and Hertz, focus your time there, rather than with Avis, National, etc. Then try your search using a couple of different codes to see which one has the lowest rates.

	Groupon	Entertainment Card	AARP
		entbk16
	A108396	B790000	A359810
	B006301	X443000	Y508537
	101114
	etatlt10	enbkwr6
		205521
		5031082
		A067700	KW47RY
	101143		If you have access to a good corporate or organizational discount code, it can often provide the best rates with certain car rental companies. One of us used to work at Microsoft, and their rates with Avis and National were often fantastic, especially for domestic rentals. However, their rate with Hertz was often higher than the non-discounted prices. Many discount codes available to employees of smaller companies are not as good. If your organization allows you to use their car rental rates with your personal rentals, it is worthwhile to check them—either through your organization’s travel portal, or by entering an applicable rate code into each rental company’s website. Use Corporate Car Rental Discounts (If You Can). Corporate rates can be particularly worthwhile when car rental prices are sky high. Often the corporate contract has a negotiated rate that doesn't vary much depending on demand. During periods of low demand, the corporate rate may be higher than normal. But, when prices go way up during the holidays, the corporate rate may only be a fraction of what you'd pay elsewhere. </ul> Dealing with sky high prices Rates from corporate codes often stay low, even when regular rates go sky high. Businesses put a high priority on the predictability of rates from their car rental partners. As a result, many corporate contracts have relatively “flat” pricing, where the negotiated rates don’t fluctuate as much as regular rates. When demand is high, and the “regular” prices rise significantly, the price for the corporate rental can remain low. For example, we recently looked at a Christmas rental in Orlando where National’s public prices were over $600, but the rate with Microsoft’s corporate code was only $266; and a weekly rental in Maui where all the big car rental companies were almost $,1000, and the rate with the Microsoft code was only $237. When rates are very high, always try any corporate codes you have access to. You might not save as much as the examples above, but you are likely to save more money than you can from the more generally available discount programs. Rates from Citibank’s travel portal can stay relatively low as well. If you have a ThankYou Rewards credit card, you can use the Citibank Travel Portal to book cash-based reservations, and not just reservations that use your points. The rates on this portal are simply weird. Most of the time that we’ve checked, rates are higher than the rates available from other discounts, and sometimes higher than even the non-discounted rate. However, the rates, particularly with National Rental Car, can be significantly lower than other websites, when prices are particularly high. For the Maui reservation above, the best non-corporate rate we could find was $820 at Costco. However, Citibank had rates available for only $400. Chase's travel portal used to work similarly. But it is now powered by Expedia, and no longer offers unusual rates. Car Rentals 101: Save Money and Time With Your Rental Use Corporate Car Rental Discounts (If You Can) TravelStrategies:*Best Car Rental Websites/Page