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CAR RENTAL DEALS SEARCH SITES

8/11/2013

Most often than not on your trip you rent a car and its good to know what all the available options are as well as which websites would fetch you the cheapest car rental cost.

To start with there are two kind of rentals you could book:

Opaque booking where you select the "type" of the car (Economy, Mid-size etc) you want to rent and make your best bid, but have no clue on which car company you would end up renting.
Transparent booking where you know which car rental agency you are renting from and have an option to either "pay at the counter" or do a "prepaid rate" which is slightly lower than the "pay at the counter"

Opaque Booking:
When you book the car rental using this kind of service you are typically renting through 3rd party travel agency site. Below are the advantages and disadvantages of this kind of rental:
Advantages:

You can generally get a car rental at a lower rate than the transparent rate available (if you are good a bidding a right price).
It tends to favor if you are looking to rent full-size or premium cars as bidding for them could give you best bang for your buck.

Disadvantages:

You pay up immediately for the rental cost and there is no way to change the "dates" or "type of car" at a later date.
You cannot use any discount codes for available rentals.
You do not earn any "airline miles" nor "car rental points credit" for these kind of reservations.

There are two primary companies in this space and they are "Hotwire" and "Priceline".

Transparent Booking:
This is how typically you would book you car rental using either 3rd party OTA websites or the car rental agency website. The only disadvantage if you might end up paying a higher price then otherwise you would pay using the "Opaque booking", but the advantages are many as listed below:
Advantages:

Selecting "pay at the counter" is better as you have a option of cancelling the reservation if you find a lower price with some other car rental agency (or the same car rental agency) and usually there is no fee for cancellation.
You can use the promotion codes as well as discount codes to lower the price. Also if there are special promotions for "airline miles" you could participate in them to offset some of your cost of car rental.

With that being said for "transparent booking", below are some of the websites which you would find useful for finding promotion / discount codes before you would go ahead and make your car rental reservation or could help you in getting the best available price for your next car rental.

Promo Codes / Discount Codes Websites:

Frequentflyerbonuses - The place where you will find most of the on-going promos for car rentals.
Zalyn - A place where you can get to chose different car rental promo/discount codes.
AvisDiscountCodes - This FT thread would give you all the info for AVIS promo codes.
HertzDiscountCodes - This FT thread would give you all the info for Hertz promo codes.

Car Rental Booking Websites (OTA):
Below is the list of websites which generally tend to give good discounted rates for car rentals. Some of them are limited to access for "members only", but if you have access to them it would be really useful. You would want to try at-least 3 of them before concluding the best available price.

CarRentalSavers - This is a great website which does not require membership. You could also add promotion/discount codes to get a better rate search for your specific rental.
CostcoTravel - This is a member-only website for all the Costco Membership holders (although the search is free to make). There is no advance cancellation fee.
UltimateRewardsTravel - This is a member-only site for the holders of chase credit cards which earn Ultimate Reward points (Chase Freedom/Sapphire/Sapphire Preferred Cards etc). Car rental booking through this portal is cheaper lot of time compared to other sites. You can either pay with UltimateRewards points or a credit card. There is no cancellation fee if you cancel the rental before 2 days in advance of your car rental pick-up.
CitiThankYouTravel - This is a member-only site for the holders of Citi Checking account or Citi ThankYou points earning credit cards.You will need to select "Book Travel --> Cars" for booking the car rental of your choice. Again the prices are comparable to what you see through Chase Ultimate Rewards mall, but there is a cancellation fees of $15 even if you cancel 2 days before your car rental pick-up. You can pay using ThankYou points or a credit card.

Note: None of the above links are referral links or earns me any commission. Thanks for reading!

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BEST WAY TO RENT A CAR FOR LEISURE TRAVELER?

3/24/2013

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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!!

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CAR RENTAL DEALS SEARCH SITES

BEST WAY TO RENT A CAR FOR LEISURE TRAVELER?

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