How to save on car rental in a recession

Don’t clear your wallet when car rental companies clear their lots.

Much as airlines have cut back on flights and routes since the recession began, the lodging industry has, er, built a lot more hotels and added a lot of rooms?! Oops. Expansion may have seemed like a great idea at the time, but this tactic has been undermined by the sagging economy, and hotel rates have fallen precipitously during the recession. And despite their best efforts otherwise, the airlines too have been forced to hold the line or even lower their fares.

The car rental biz, however, has weathered the storm better than nearly any other part of the travel industry. Car rental companies have successfully cut their fleets, desk hours and locations to cope with falling demand — which means that car rentals these days cost as much as they ever did, if not more so.

Of all the commodities and services you encounter in the travel experience, the number of automobiles available at any given airport is the most fixed and potentially scarce. With flights, you can almost always book an earlier or later flight, and with hotels you can always find a room a little farther away or at a lesser property if need be. But with rental cars, when the airport rental car agencies sell down or retire inventory, there is a very real reduction in capacity — and prices rise. This is exactly what has happened, and herein lies a challenge for the budget- and convenience-minded traveler.

Sure, there is always somewhere you can get a car — for example, you can always book off-airport. But prices are sometimes higher, and getting to and from the rental office is often a hassle in the extreme, which is the last thing you want to worry about when you are trying to catch a flight. Imagine standing in downtown Portland on a Sunday morning wondering how you are going to get to the airport; you don’t want to be that guy.

Among my friends and family, I have come by a good reputation for getting car rental deals; on a trip to Cleveland last week, one of the members of our traveling party had his secretary booking the travel (nice work if you can get it), and mentioned casually that rental costs were high, around $50 a day. I told him to call his secretary off the job, and within 20 minutes had booked a $13-a-day rental. He asked, “It’s not some tiny car, is it?” It was — c’mon, we would be driving a total of 40 miles on the trip — but I went back and upgraded the rental to a full-size car for a whopping $3 more per day. I wrote him back: “I wouldn’t do that to a man of your reputation; we have a full-size sedan.”

Finding an affordable car rental isn’t rocket science, even in today’s tight market. I’ve put together a few tips below to help avoid clearing out your wallet when car rental companies clear out their lots.

Book early
As your travel dates approach, more reservations come in, most often for the most affordable or coveted rental car sizes and models. Accordingly, availability plummets and prices climb. As inventory drops, many car rental companies will move their vehicles around to accommodate locations with higher demand — but don’t count on it. In the past year, I have seen more “car size/model not available” booking engine messages than ever before; in fact, I can’t recall having seen this more than once or twice in the entire previous decade.

Given this scarcity, your chances of getting an affordable rental — or a rental at all — increase with every additional day in advance that you book your car.