Getting the Best Rental-Car Prices

If you plan on renting a car this summer, a bit of forethought can help you knock quite a bit off a potential rental bill. Here are some suggestions:

Check alternate airports. If you’re heading for a city with more than one airport, check rates at each field. You often find differences, such as what I found from Hertz for a one-week compact car rental from June 5 to 12, and those differences aren’t always what you think they might be:

• In New York City, the $411 rate at JFK was about $40 less than the rates at La Guardia or Newark.

• In the Boston area, the rate at Logan was $95 less than the rate at “Manchester-Boston.”

• In the San Francisco Bay area, the rate at San Francisco International ($423) was $80 less than the rate at Oakland and $160 less than the rate at San Jose.

• For Montreal, rates were about the same at Dorval Airport and Burlington, Vermont, just across the border, at a tad over $250.

• But for Vancouver, the rate at Vancouver International ($C145) was almost $100 less than the rate at Bellingham.

You can often book your air ticket into any of several adjacent airports, so your best deal may be to fly to/from the airport with the lowest car-rental rates.

Check an opaque website. For the same test car and dates, at JFK Airport, the “opaque” rate on Hotwire was $263, compared with $411 from Hertz. And an even lower bid at Priceline might have worked.

Check an off-airport rental. Airports pile lots of charges on rental companies with in-terminal desks and on-site lots—charges that the rental companies fob off on you, either through higher base rates or as mandatory extras:

• In my New York test, you could knock almost $100 off the rental rate by heading to Hicksville ($360). Better yet, consider Yonkers or Princeton (both $189).

• But in San Francisco, the downtown rate was only $10 less than the airport rate.

Unless you really want to be downtown, you have to weigh any rate difference against the extra costs and hassles of getting downtown.

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In Europe, avoid stiff premium-station fees. Some European rentals carry surcharges for pickups at “premium stations,” which typically means airports and sometimes railroad stations, as well.

• Germany and Switzerland add 20 percent to the entire bill, Austria adds 17 percent, Italy adds 15 percent to 17 percent, the Netherlands adds 16 percent with an $80 minimum, and the Czech Republic adds 12 percent.

• Denmark adds a flat fee of $76, Belgium adds $70, France adds $52, Portugal adds $49, Ireland adds $41, Spain adds $38, the UK adds $36, and Finland adds $19.

You can avoid those charges by renting from a downtown office, but plan carefully: Although airport offices are typically open 24/7, downtown offices often keep “business hours” only. These surcharges apply only to the renting office; in most cases, you can return the car to an airport location without extra cost. I’m indebted to the good folks at Gemutlichkeit for their excellent data on European rentals; their free downloadable report is a great resource for anyone planning to drive in Europe.

Avoid stiff international drop-off rates in Europe. Although you can often pick up and return a rented car at different offices within the same country without a drop-off fee, cross-border one-way rentals almost always entail stiff drop-off charges. On some trips, you can avoid this charge by arranging two separate one-country rentals. A friend is planning a two-week trip, flying into Paris, driving through France into Italy, and returning from Naples. He found he could knock several hundred dollars off the cost by arranging no-charge one-way rentals from Paris to Menton, taking a quick train hop across the border to Ventimiglia or San Remo, and starting a new one-country rental. You can do this at many border crossings.

Caution: My data cover a one-time, one-company test. Although the figures may change for each trip, however, the conclusions do not: Check out the options before you commit.

Ed Perkins on Travel is copyright (c) 2012 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

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