I have been looking for the cheapest car rental online and just like hotel and air flights, it is not easier. Although I have more experience with finding the best deal for car rentals than the two. I find that priceline or hotwire is not the way to go. Why? because they do not offer the cheapest car rental out there. I still use them though for reference as they can tell me what car rental companies I have to do my research first.
So for MAUI, we want to rent a car for two days only. We will be staying at a condo for the whole week and Maui is not that big compared to Oahu or Big Island that we must have a car for a whole week. Plus, they have bus system that travels you to almost the entire island (mauicounty.gov/bus) for a dollar! So instead of paying a whole week of rental we will save a lot by just renting the last two days.
Priceline and hotwire suggest that Budget has the lowest car rentals for a mid size SUV. I could go for economy or compact but their rate are just about the same as SUV, this is one of those times where it doesn't make sense how they get their logic for their rates. Sometimes the luxury cars are cheaper to rent than the standard sedan and sometimes a one day shorter of your rental dates would save you a 100 dollars. So you really have to do your research when dealing with car rentals. I went to their site and find their standard rate. True enough you can get it lower than $140 that priceline and hotwire quoted me. Budget gave me the same rate but since they have this "PAY NOW" rate you can get it for $128, a $12 saving. It's not much but hey it's a saving. The con is that you will of course pay it now, so the cancellation might be inconvenient if you decided later you don't want it. It helps if you are sure about your dates so you can play around with the idea. Like in our case, we will be needing a transportation when we land to our condo but a week rental will cost us at least $750. While it is nice to have a car for the whole week it is just way too much. They do have SpeediShuttle (speedishuttle.com) that will take us from the airport to our condo for $37 but you have to reserve it. We can also take a cab but it might cost us around $50. If we rent a car though for just one day when we arrive, it will cost us $140. It's a no brainer, speedishuttle is the way to go. We will need a car when we leave so I started playing around with the dates, starting from next day we get there till we leave. Here is a list of rates with number of days, take note that when booking you have to arrange the times of pick up and drop off according to your flight schedules. Also this is important, when picking the pick up and drop off hours always put the same as they will charge you per hours rate if you go less or over a 24 hour reservation. Sometime they will give you an allowance of 15 minutes like if you pick it up at 10:00am and return it at 10:15am the next morning, the rate will still be the same but if you make your drop off hour as 10:30am then you can expect to add another $45 to your bill. My advice is always make it the same hours for both pick up and drop off and make it a whole day not half. Okay so here is a list for comparison:
Looking at this list, it will cost us at least $65.35 to have a car for the last two days of our trip in Maui. Compare it to a $750 week rental we will save tons! Given this savings I think we can even afford to rent the jeep wrangler. Sounds great! But wait I have more ways to save.. Forget the bidding war in priceline or even hotwire low rate pricing, My last trick is better, if you have a membership like BJ's or Costco, or if you belong to an insurance company like Geico, they do have a benefit for their members where they have exclusive discount for certain merchandize or services like car rentals. Just go to their site and look for travel discount code and coupons, here are some site you can go to:
- http://travel.bjs.com/car-rentals/
- http://www.costcotravel.com/#11_rentalCars
- http://www.geicoprivileges.com
- http://www.retailmenot.com/search/?query=car+rental
Also, your credit card gives you benefit like this so make sure you check that out too. If you can't however find any decent coupon or code, try looking at the car rental website and see if they offer any deals.
Or buy those entertainment coupon book, they cost $35.00 though but they include tons of coupons that you can use all year round! We intend to use it for our trip but we don't have enough time for it to be delivered to our house before we leave so we just signed up for the digital version (entertainment.com). I actually like it better because it's not exclusive to one state as oppose to the book. I found a coupon for budget but it didn't work because it excludes Hawaii. Although it didn't work they still honor entertainment membership so I still got a discount from the standard rate.
Turns out our jeep wrangler 2D rate with the entertainment code for 2 days is $180.87. Not bad! Can't wait to try it.
Hope this post help you in finding the best deals on car rentals.
