Save on Car Rentals
I am in Kauai on a last minute trip with my wife. While fortunately I was able to secure our hotel and airfare last minute on points/miles, the car rental ended up being costly.
Normally when looking for a car rental I search a number of sites to find the best rate. I generally start with Kayak to get a general feel for the prices.
Then I head over to the Chase Ultimate Rewards site since I have found they often have lower prices. Finally I narrow in on the cheapest company and search for relevant promo/coupon codes.
For this trip, that process got me down to about $60 a day including taxes or $180 total for a three day rental. I am planning to pay for the rental with Arrival Plus points, but I still want it as cheaply as possible.
Car Rental Savers Lowers My Price
After going through a ton of coupons that were somehow blocked because of President’s Day (which last time I checked was more than a week ago), I headed to Car Rental Savers.
Car Rental Savers automatically inputs the best corporate and coupon codes available. If you want to override their choices, they easily allow for that as well. This means that it should work to get you the lowest overall price.
While Car Rental Savers earns a commission if you book through them, you can also take the codes they give you and book directly through the rental car company and go through a portal to save even more. Whether you want to do that or not is a personal decision, especially if the site helps you find the best codes.
I have known about this site for awhile, but I generally forget about it when conducting my searches. Thankfully I remembered this time and the $180 lowest price dropped to $151 including taxes. While the car rental still isn’t cheap, that is a decent savings.
Conclusion
One of the first things I tell people when they ask how to save money on travel is that they need to develop a set of tools. Car Rental Savers is a new tool that joins the others in my arsenal. I will always search more than one source, since unfortunately I have yet to find that one tool that beats all others.
Do you use Car Rental Savers or a similar site when searching for car rentals? Let me know in the comments.
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[…] Miles to Memories clued me in on another car rental website I’d never heard of, called Car Rental Savers, that automatically inputs the best coupon and corporate codes to get you the best price. Also always remember to enter your reservation into Autoslash. […]
This is wonderfully written. This is the final pit stop for all those who have doubts related to car rental services. Choosing the right car with budgetary amount with good safety measures does the trick for the day. I know one such firm at Bahrain that offers world class car rental services. It’s called Almuftah Rent a car Bahrain.
I haven’t tried CarRentalSavers, and look forward to putting it in the rotation. Besides the ones that Shawn and others have mentioned, I also find that CostcoTravel.com sometimes comes out best for me – even compared to going direct with coupons.
Don’t forget to do the same search each month leading up to your trip. My last Hawaii trip had the price drop 5 times.
Good point. Everyone should regularly check their rental car prices since they tend to fluctuate quite often.
Wow just compared their price for an existing rental I have April 2 and its $50 higher. Capital One has them significantly beat!
Thanks for sharing that data point. Like I said there isn’t one site that always has the best rate in my experience. That is why it is good to have an arsenal of tools to search.
Next time check outhttp://www.discounthawaiicarrental.com for Hawaii rentals. We use it for all our interisland travel. Usually ends up being the best at the time, and you can still add you confirmation number to autoslash
I hadn’t heard of that site. Thanks for sharing!
I find better rates using portals like Chase URs or Citi TYP. I checked CRS and found same car with TYPs for $92 less (assuming TYP are worth 1cpp).
Kauai is a ripoff market. Surprised an independent doesn’t start up. Got to be payoffs involved…
Yeah Kauai is expensive. I always check Citi and Chase as well because they do sometimes have better rates. In this case the cheapest car that either had was $225 for three days, so they weren’t the best option in this scenario.
Definitely always use CarRentalSavers as my first stop in finding a rental. For the lower-end car rental brands, you can’t beat it. But like Miro mentioned, I’ve definitely been able to find cheaper rates with National through coupons and such on their direct website. I’d say I wind up booking through CarRentalSavers about the the time, and pretty much all of the cheap when finding the absolute lowest rental price is my primary concern (i.e. no brand loyalty).
To compensate for my lack of proofreading, I wanted to clarify that I use them about half of the time, and all of the time when I want to get a rock-bottom rate.
I’ve been using carrentals.com and other websites never beat it. However, depending on which rental company you rent from you might go to directly their website and use a searchable coupon.
I did get better prices on CarRentalSavers than Ultimate Rewards or Autoslash or anywhere else I checked. Zalyn returned the same prices. Thanks for the tips.
I actually like zalyn.com. You create a profile and then run the rental car request. Goes through Priceline or you use the codes yourself at the websites. Has worked well for me, especially when it identifies the rentals which give you 500-1000 airline miles for three day rentals and such.
Great suggestion! Thanks JRG.