BEST WAY TO RENT A CAR FOR LEISURE TRAVELER?

On your air trip one of the concern is the cost of car rental. As the cost of the flight tickets are dynamic so goes the car rental prices. But if you are leisure traveler looking for bargain on you car rental then you might be interested in the strategy below which can sometimes result in good amount of savings on your wallet. 

Step1: Start your car rental search at Expedia, Priceline or CostcoTravel:
Begin your search for car rental prices at the Expedia, Priceline or CostcoTravel . Most often than not you will get fairly decent idea on going price of car rental. Another advantage of going this route is you get the prices which are not "discounted" through any rental car company or partner discount/promotions. 
For e.g. sample search for SJC Airport for car rental from 04/13/2013 to 04/15/2013 yields a lowest price of Economy car (incl of taxes) as $38.31 (Payless), $38 (Payless) and $37.82 (Alamo) as shown below

1. Expedia Pricing

2. Priceline pricing

3. Costco Pricing

Step2: Go through the website "Zalyn" to see what are the coupon options it presents:
You do not  need to sign up for the service and your intent is to get listing of different possible coupons. Zalyn does a good job of listing good set of discount coupons and codes as shown below.

4. Zalyn showing different discount coupon and codes!

Step3: Use Step1, Step2 and Car rental vendor's website to figure out the pricing for your rental:
This step involves using data of approximate price for your rental from Step1 combined with different discount codes provided by Zalyn in Step2 to determine what further discounts you could get. Since we know that Payless and Alamo were the lowest, it would be best to try different codes provided for Payless and Alamo above. Selecting "Payless - Save 15% on your rental" gives a code which discount's Payless cost to $34.47 (all inclusive) for Economy Car as shown below.

5. Payless website with 15% off coupon

Step4: Is this the best? Check one more thing!!
One area where "Zalyn" lacks is in the ability to determine if you can earn any "Airline Miles" and thus assigning a discount code and coupon to earn those miles. Since rental from "Payless" does not earn any "Airline Miles" but "Alamo" does earn them you might want to check if there are any special promotion code at "frequenflyerbonuses" which gives you a good discount as well earn "Airline Miles"? (Note: Earning Airline miles adds a cost of $.75/day to $1.5/day and earns from 50 miles/day [UA, Delta] to 600 miles/rental [Southwest] or 1000 miles/rental [Virgin Atlantic] , so you might want to take that into account in your car rental).

Best of luck for your NEXT CAR RENTAL search!!