Cheap Car Rent Deals

Regardless of where you're going, the best way to find a cheap car rent deal is to use a price comparison or aggregation website:

Hotwire

This price comparison website makes it possible to find rental cars for little as $14 a day. To see what they have to offer, begin by pressing the Cars radio button. You can then enter where you're traveling. For this example, we'll use DFW Airport in Dallas, TX. You can then choose when you'll pick-up and drop-off your vehicle. Once you've entered this information, click the red Find a Car button. After Hotwire completes its search, it will display all of the results it finds.

For each result, you'll see its price, seating and type of model. What you won't see is the company offering it. The feature that makes Hotwire unique is they don't display the companies offering rentals until after you book. This is why they're able to offer such low rates. Using the Dallas example, Hotwire found a rental for just $16 a day.

Rental Car Momma

Unlike Hotwire, this website isn't designed to search for multiple rental car deals. Instead, it aggregates all of the specials being offered by different rental car companies. From the homepage, you can access coupon or promo codes for Budget, Alamo, Enterprise, Hertz, National, Dollar, Thrifty and Avis. In addition to accessing coupon and promo codes by company, you can also see what's available in different regions of the US, as well as Canada, Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, Central America and South America.

When you click one of the companies that's listed on the homepage, you will see a list of links to money saving codes, as well as any actual coupons that are being offered. For example, if you checked out Budget's page of specials, you would see:

  • 30% Savings: Depending on where you'd be renting, you could save up to thirty percent.
  • Save $25: If you were renting a car for a week, this special would allow you to save $25 on it.
  • Free GPS Rental: Instead of paying $10 to $12 a day for GPS, this special would make it possible for you to use a GPS for two days without any charges.
  • One Free Day of Weekend Rental: If you were taking a weekend trip, this special would give you a free Sunday rental.

Kayak

While some travelers get overwhelmed if they are presented with too many options, others want as many choices as possible. If you are in the latter group, you will be very happy with the functionality that Kayak provides. When you enter your trip information, you will also be able to pick what other comparison sites you want to search. Then once you perform your search and the results are returned, you will have full control over what's displayed. You will be able to use the filters on the left side of the page to filter the results by car class, miles per gallon, rental agency and more.

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