How to save on car rental in a recession

If you’re feeling courageous, book late
The trip to Cleveland was a last-minute trip to help out an old friend, so of necessity was booked the day before travel. If you find yourself in this spot, or if you are feeling courageous and lucky, you will find that the car rental companies will rent you a car very cheaply, as there is no upside in having cars sitting on lots unrented.

In this situation, you are in the driver’s seat in more ways than one. The risks can be high, however; remember that the whole reason we are looking at this topic in early 2010 is the fact that rental lot inventory is shrinking. And keep in mind that you may not have much choice —the more popular car sizes/models sell out fastest, so if you’re picky about what you drive, you’ll want to book early, not late.

Check the deals and search liberally
Of the more essential pieces of the travel puzzle, car rental prices tend to be the most mutable and variable in my experience. I have seen it happen that the Hertz site will show a $70/day rental for a compact car, Orbitz will show a $35/day rental for a compact car with Hertz and an auction site will give it to you for $19.

Car rental companies also tend to package their special offers in almost countless ways.

If you rent enough cars over time, you see a lot of odd pricing:

• Renting a full-size car may be cheaper than renting a compact
• As folks move away from gas guzzlers, a van or SUV rental may be the cheapest option on the lot
• A five-day rental is expensive, but a “weekly rental” with a minimum of five days is very affordable
• Altering your pickup times to qualify for a “weekend” rental can save you heaps

Aggregator sites, and Kayak in particular, allow you to easily tweak your car class, pickup and return times, options for on- and off-airport counters, and more in order to get a broad picture of what is available. This wide view can be very helpful when your first search produces only rates that are higher than your heating bill this winter.

Finally, when you are really stuck you may find that calling the rental company directly will be the best way to get a good rate. As I have written before, the online systems calculate everything on a fairly strict 24-hour clock, and may not show you “long weekend” or weeklong discounts for which you may qualify simply because the times you gave are short an hour. A good agent will see this and can override the system to give you the volume discount.

Consider your coupons and affiliations
I am a member of two national associations, both of which offer car rental discounts as a perk of membership. One has a deal with Avis for weekend rentals, the other with Alamo for weekly rentals. AAA has deals with almost everybody (no surprise there, as it is an automobile association). My practice is to turn to these discounts primarily when inventory is down and prices are skyrocketing, when they can really soften the pain.

You call the shots
Although I have a firm policy against doing so with airline and lodging bookings, I almost always use a “name your price” or other similar extreme discounting method for car rentals. Why? For the simple reason that most airport car rentals are created equal in a way that an airline booking or hotel room is not.

Buying an airline ticket using these systems is extremely risky, in my experience; you don’t know the exact flight time, the route, the duration of any connections or even the airline in many cases. When you discover you saved 80 bucks to purchase a 6:05 a.m. flight with a connection that takes you hundreds of miles out of your way and includes a seven-hour layover in an airport terminal with a single Hudson News store and a pretzel kiosk, that’s a lesson you never forget.

It’s not much different with hotels; if “location, location, location” is the mantra of real estate agents and vacationers picking hotels alike, then buying blind is riskier than trying to flip a house in 2009.

A car rental you will pick up at the airport counter and return to the airport counter, and the actual vehicle you will drive in any rental class varies so little from one rental agency to the next that it is not even worth considering.