4 Hacks To Save Money on Car Rental

You learn to save on everything when you Bootstrap

Every week I used to fly to the UK on a Monday morning and come back on a Thursday night. I would pick up a rental car from the airport, drive around the country visiting potential clients and then drop the car back before flying home. Over 4 years I did this more than 200 times and because we were bootstrapping, I had to figure out how to keep this cost to an absolute minimum.

1. Always return your car full of fuel. But the trick is to fill it up 30 miles from the airport.
   Car rental companies make a significant margin on cars being returned empty or needing to be filled up. For example they will charge you £2 per litre instead of the pump rate of £1.30. So it makes sense to always to return the car full of gas. However instead of filling up the car in the airport itself, I always filled it up when I got to about 30-40 miles from the drop off. This way the needle still showed a full tank on the dash, but you save yourself 30-40 miles of fuel or £5-10 per rental each time.
2. Never go for the extra insurance.
   This is another profit centre for care hire companies and usually costs an extra £15-20 per rental day. As I used to rent a car for three days at a time, I saved £45 x 200 days or roughly £9,000 by doing this and during this time I scraped a bumber once and chipped a windscreen once. So I only had to pay out £650 in total on the insurance excess.
3. Hire from a last minute website — like rentalcars.com to consistently get rates at 30% less than the regular price.
   Rentalcars.com searches all the excess inventory from car hire companies at a location. Because it is priced at a discount, you nearly always get 20-30% less than the quoted price from going to the car hire companies directly. A Ford Mondeo is the same whether you rent it from Hertz or from Avis and in my experience of using all the major car hire companies (Avis, Hertz, Europcar, Budget, Enterprise, Sixt etc) there was very little between them in terms of customer service.
4. The best value car is almost always the Small Family Size.
   In Europe the best value cars are often the small family size e.g. a VW Golf or Ford Focus. On rentalcars.com, you usually get a quote for the small family size that is the same as the cheapest small hatchback.
   The quality of the general run of the mill car these days always blows me away. I was really into cars growing up and own a classic car but nowadays there is hardly any difference in terms of comfort, acceleration, and ride quality between say a Hyundai i40 (which is a small family size) and a BMW 3 Series. I based this on how tired I would feel after 3 days of driving 500 miles in a car, and although I would notice it more if I had driven say a Ford Fiesta, I felt the same way in every car size above the Small Family one.