You need a rental car? Here are a few of my handy tips for getting a good car or van at a decent price:
Believe it or not, I'm not going to tell you to contact your local travel agent. You can most likely get one for less on your own. Forget the Entertainment, the AAA, the AARP, and all those discounts. Your best bet is to use Hotwire. If you want to shop around, then go to a discount coupon code site and choose your coupons. Some you can even stack for a greater discount, but searching is time consuming and you will not save that much over the Hotwire price. www.slickdeals.net has an entire thread with all of the codes for every car rental company out there.
What is the downside to Hotwire? You don't know which company you will be getting the car from, but it will be from the Big 5. I have yet to have a friend or client have a problem using Hotwire and neither have I. Their prices are even lower than I can get at an agent rate. You can try and negotiate a price lower than Priceline's published price and see if they accept, but it's not worth it to save a dime or two. Stick with Hotwire and you'll be happy.
Be aware that a standard, mid-size, and full-size are the same price. Sometimes you can even get a great deal on your rental car and a lot of bonus miles by using an airline site. You do not have to fly that airline to get the miles. Say you are flying on Continental but want to get American Airline miles. Just book the car on the AA site and you get the miles and the discounts. Cool, huh?
You know the print coupons you get in nearly all travel magazines and in the AAA and Entertainment books? You can't use the upgrade coupon online, but once you get to the counter, they will honor it 99% of the time. So make sure you book a full-size to upgrade to a premium car. If you book a mid-size, they will only upgrade you to a full-size a lot of times. That's not a bargain being that it's the same price.
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