Interesting article about how car rental prices are rising while airline/hotel prices and the economy are tanking.

I'm presently looking for a rental for our upcoming end of July trip, and I'm not finding any bargains, even with promotional codes and coupons.

That's a great article. I noticed the price increase back in January when I was booking a car at San Jose, California to go to Slow Bowl in Paso Robles. Normally, I could find pretty low weekend rates but the cost for the 4 day weekend rental was close to my airfair. I ended up finally using Costco and Alamo with a 20% discount. I noticed the same thing flying into Sacramento in March.

At least now I understand why. I didn't understand why the prices were up when fewer people were flying. Good ideas on how to save money given the reduced supply of cars.

Thanks for that link, Terry. We recently found that the price on a Hertz AAA rental in July had gone down slightly from when we first looked in May and then earlier this month. But that was for a month-long rental, and the weekly rates were much higher.

We are going to be in California for 31 days this summer, and we were able to save a few hundred dollars by getting a one-day rental from the airport, then dropping the car in Napa (where we are going) and picking up another car at the monthly rental rate. I guess in California they must charge you a percentage of the overall rental fee for airport pickup, not just a one-off fee.

I think that summer rates are also very high, and they do vary by the time of year. When we went to California last winter, we got a very low monthly rate in January because there isn't a lot of demand then, at least not for long-term rentals. But we had to switch cars after 42 days in order to be able to re-up the credit card insurance. In February (I guess when more people are taking vacations), the monthly rental rates were significantly higher.

- Roz

Terry:

Try googling local auto dealers in the location where you are traveling to if it is in the USA. We found a couple of used car dealers that rent for $20 a day in Minneapolis and New Orleans. Many used car dealerships have their own "rental fleet".

The ONLY bargain I found in Europe was on Ryan Air. You can fake out the website by just getting a flight number, putting it in as your "arriving flight" and then renting the car even if you aren't flying Ryan.