Gaming the Rental Car System

[jAZ]

So I am planning a trip to New Orleans for in late July and we are renting a car for the week. When I travel, its usually for business (in which case I expense the rental car rate) or we drive or fly to places where we have friends and usually don't get a rental car.

This trip, I was looking around for advice or codes to cheaper rental car rates. If you go to Hertz and rent a car there, it will cost you about $400 for a full size car for a full week in NOLA. Same was true for other sites.

So I decided to give Priceline's Name Your Own Price feature a try to see what it did. For the same exact car, we are paying $185 for the week rather than $400/week. Both from Hertz at the Airport. That's $17/day + fees and taxes.

There was a trick though.

To get that price, even through Priceline's bidding feature, you have to start with the "compact" car. And then submit a crazy low bid. I did $10/day. They then warn you that your bid will almost surely be rejected and tell you how much to bid "$13 for 'good' chance and $15 for 'great' chance.

So I bid $13 for the compact car, and it was accepted.

Then during the post purchase screens, they offered me the opportunity to upgrade to the full size car for $4 more per day, or $17/day.

So next time you go rent a car, try the Priceline site and follow these steps, it could save you a ton of money. But be sure you are OK with the compact car if for some reason they don't offer the cheap upgrade.

[MIAdragon]

I hate priceline. There is a fairly new company (for the states anyway) named Sixt that we use, for not much more than the price of the wonderful Grand Marquis you can get into a C class Mercedes. I just rented one for the July 4th week for less than 40 a day.

[Rain Man]

Awesome. I may give this a try.

I've always been scared to use Priceline because I've been concerned about ending up driving a little clown car to the Bates Motel. But if you can do upgrades it's worth trying.