Car rentals are one of the many parts about planning travel that you can easily save money. Just a little bit of pre-planning, lots of advance notice and remembering to check back can save you a good chunk of your travel budget. Like hotel rooms and unlike airline tickets, car rentals are one of the things that you can reserve in advance and cancel without penalty. Make sure you read the fine print and Do Not pre-pay or you may lose the ability to cancel without penalty!
I recently booked a car rental for our upcoming trip to the East Coast. We are flying into Dulles airport in Washington, DC (IAD) and leaving 2 weeks later from the Philadelphia airport (PHL). When I first started looking into a direct rental, it was in the thousands of dollars. This was really not going to work for our budget so I put together a patchwork rental which consisted of picking up a compact car from IAD, driving for 3 days, picking up a new intermediate rental from a local suburban office for the rest of our trip then dropping off the original rental back at PHL. Whew! A lot of work but instead of costing a few thousand dollars, this annoying and more involved car rental would bring our cost down to $711! I booked this rental on Costco Travel on 5/17/15 and it was through two different car rental companies.
Every so often, I would check back on the Costco Travel website to see what the going car rental rates were for my trip. Eventually on 6/25/15, I discovered that rates had fallen dramatically and I was now able to cancel my two separate car reservations and book a single reservation in a more desirable Intermediate SUV class of car, pick it up from IAD when we arrive and drop it off at PHL when we leave. Even better, for $379, our new Intermediate SUV cost much less than the intermediate and compact cars! Yay!
Even though I was very satisfied and much happier about saving over $300 from our original car rental plans and shaving off some extra hassle, that doesn't stop me from continuing to check on the prices periodically! Since the kids and I were up extra late for the 4th of July festivities in the neighborhood, I decided to check Costco Travel again. I was very pleasantly surprised to discover that the price has dropped again to $340! I've saved another $39 and all it took was a little perseverance! I'll be sure to continue checking back every so often to see if I can get this 2 week car rental down even lower and/or upgrade to a Standard size SUV.
*Just a final note that if I had wanted to save even more money, I could have opted to go with a smaller car size. As of this writing, the Economy car is $220, Compact is $234 and Intermediate is $252. But I hope the Intermediate SUV (Toyota RAV) will be more comfortable for the five of us and easier to drive on unfamiliar roads with the higher vantage. :)
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