Best car rental strategies?

Try this site....They have some pretty good deals depending on the location. Play around with the dates and different locations and airports for pickup/drop off b/c it could save you some money. Also play check out the website on different dates as the prices fluctuate. It's free to book and doesn't require any credit card information. So you can make 100 reservations and pick the one that works for you. Good luck!

http://www.carrentalsavers.com/

Thanks for the tip athach624. I badly needed a rental car and used the site to find some great rates. Repped.

I ended up booking directly with Hertz Local Edition. (I wanted to avoid Enterprise, as they can be snippy about taking cars on long road trips). I reserved a full-size car for $371, all fees included + Sirius, for PA-FL-PA during spring break for 9 days.

Question -- if I see discount coupons between now and then (better than AAA, which I used), can I apply them to the existing reservation or do I need to start from scratch?

Quote from Kren : I ended up booking directly with Hertz Local Edition. (I wanted to avoid Enterprise, as they can be snippy about taking cars on long road trips). I reserved a full-size car for $371, all fees included + Sirius, for PA-FL-PA during spring break for 9 days. Question -- if I see discount coupons between now and then (better than AAA, which I used), can I apply them to the existing reservation or do I need to start from scratch?

If you want to use other discount codes most of the time you will have to cancel the existing reservation and start over. They don't like you to have a combination of two CDPs or combined discounts for the reservation. Also, it may downgrade or upgrade the car depending on the discounts given.

Autoslash (or whatever there name is) was a good bet many months ago, but all the major rental car players stopped cooperating with them many months ago, so that is why you are not getting much of a result from their website.

It's a game. You have to spend a lot of time looking up codes, etc. on the web -- and -- if you are lucky and find the right combo of legit codes you can save some big bucks -- like two-thirds. However, it can take a lot of time and effort.

If you don't want to spend that much time, you can do the lazy way and bid via Priceline. Sometimes Priceline can get you about as cheap as you will find. At other times Priceline will be way up there and not much of a bargain.

But, Priceline does not take a lot of effort. So, it's web surfing with terms such as "XXX car rental promo code" or trying Priceline or Hotwire.

Myself, I've been around long enough to know the codes, but I still try my luck on priceline and still -- often -- get my best price there.

Quote from chinchillax : If you want to use other discount codes most of the time you will have to cancel the existing reservation and start over. They don't like you to have a combination of two CDPs or combined discounts for the reservation. Also, it may downgrade or upgrade the car depending on the discounts given.

You can change the cdp when you modify any reservation.

I recently tried possibly every coupon / car rental site out there as rates for my weekly rental in Chicago were crazy. Payless was offering an Economy for around $300 and the regulars were all over $500. In the end I managed to lock-in a great deal with Budget for a little over $200. I am pretty happy with my efforts as the regular rate was over $700 !!!

Here's something I learnt along the way. Hopefully it helps you and other renters as well
1. Rates change frequently. Its best to book a rental as soon as you know the dates. This is a backup plan. Book with a site that does *NOT* ask for your credit card, so that you can cancel if you find a better rate. Book a discounted rate. There are coupons for everything.

2. Closer to your travel date, start checking rates daily(with coupons) to see if something better comes up. If your plan/dates are firm and you fine with locking-in your rental, you should also try expedia, priceline, hotwire, travelocity & carrentals.com. Personally, I prefer flexibility and usually manage to find a similar(if not better) rate.

3. Most coupons are available within a month of your travel date. Booking too far in advance may not get you the best rate.

4. Most discounts are for weekend/weekly rentals. If you have flexibility around dates, you might score big.

5. Great seasonal one-way deals are available when rental car companies move their fleet. I believe they move fleet North in Spring and South in Fall.

For coupons, you have a bunch of options
1. Rental car company websites. Also, AAA, Costco, BJs, etc have car rental coupons.
2. Coupon websites like retailmenot.com and urlhasbeenblocked.com. They have a good collection of coupons, but require too much work.
3. Specialized car rental coupon websites like autoslash.com(too bad it doesn't work anymore), carrentalsavers.com and a new one zalyn.com

I read about zalyn.com recently on thepointsguy blog and had good luck with it. It can be a little confusing at first. Some of the things I like:
1. They have lots & lots(read hundreds) of coupons. I like that they also have AAA, Costco & other coupons but you need to signup to access them.
2. They claim to find applicable coupons(based on location & dates). A box on one of the pages tells you how many didn't apply to your trip. I tried a few random searches and saw the numbers change, so there might be some truth to it.
3. You can hand-pick a bunch of coupons and go to travelocity.com to see the discounted rates. Much easier to compare a bunch of coupons quickly, rather than trying each one. They don't ask for your credit card.

Stuff I didn't like
1. Zalyn asks you to enter available rates!!! Its a bit clumsy in my opinion. Why can't they just get the rate themselves? Apparently, they use the rate to calculate the discounted rate to figure which coupons are better than others.
2. When they send you to Travelocity, you need to look closely to compare the total amount. The results are sorted by the daily rate and the daily rate is highlighted, but the coupons are usually applied to the total amount, which is hard to read.

Here's the link: http://zalyn.com/

Good luck with your search!

zalyn.com helped SOOOO much! It was worth the extra checking back and forth on Travelocity. Using this site saved me $70! Thanks Mel345 !

Thanks