Our favorite car rental price tracker, AutoSlash, has an ingenious hack for saving money on that next car rental. I guess we can't figure everything out!
For cheaper car rentals, instead of booking the car at the time you need it exactly at, try looking for another reservation within the half hour. AutoSlash found simply doing this can save up to 10%, and in one scenario, it cut the price by over a hundred dollars.
Not only do you not need to show up on the dot-all car rental agencies have a leeway for picking up the car, anyways!-travelers are able to lock in the cheaper price.
(Seriously, we don't ever book a car rental without ever using AutoSlash.)
Here's what AutoSlash recently posted:
Instead of automatically booking your pickup time to be on the hour - say, 9 a.m. or 1 p.m. or 6 p.m. - ask for a second quote for the half hour before or after your original time - as in 9:30 a.m. or 1:30 p.m. or 6:30 p.m.
Skeptical that this car rental hack can work? We ran two quotes for a weeklong minivan rental at Salt Lake City International Airport (SLC), picking up and returning at noon and 12:30 p.m. Shifting the time to the half hour saved 10% without breaking a sweat.
Similarly, for a recent quote at San Francisco International Airport (SFO), we saw a whopping $143 difference in National's price simply by shifting the pickup and return time by 30 minutes.
The reason for this? It turns out it is a pretty common practice due to price algorithms, price shopping and undercutting the competition.
But since we're not the experts, we'll let the folks who figured it out explain it. 😉
