Want to Save on Car Rentals? Go Low-Tech

Want to save on your next car rental? You may have to tear yourself away from the Internet and do the unthinkable: make a few phone calls.

Sites like Kayak, Priceline and TripAdvisor have been a boon for frugal travelers. But they also foster a potentially costly illusion: that all bargains are a click or tap away. As I discovered after some obsessive searching for car rental deals, low-tech and no-tech strategies can sometimes be as helpful as the latest online innovations.

I started my hunt — for a two-day weekend rental on a trip to Vancouver scheduled two weeks away — with the usual suspects, the major aggregators and booking sites. Kayak, Expedia, Carrentals.com, Rentalcars.com and the blind-booking site Hotwire all turned up similar rates for an economy rental from the airport. I found that big variations in price on the low end of the market are rare — and it turns out there is a reason for that: industry consolidation.

“Hertz, Avis Budget Group and Enterprise now control 95 percent of the domestic market through their various brands,” said Neil Abrams, president of Abrams Consulting, which specializes in the car rental industry. “These companies are ultracompetitive among themselves.” Kayak found me the best deal by a slim margin, $13.15 a day from Enterprise, a price that included unlimited mileage, taxes and fees but not additional charges like insurance.

So I booked. Unlike a flight or hotel reservation, this was just the beginning. Car bookings can generally be canceled anytime up to the instant you step to the counter and pay. (Hotwire is one prominent exception.) “This is one of the biggest advantages consumers have,” Mr. Abrams said. “There’s really no downside to locking in a good price with a reservation.” (A quick aside for renters without a booking who have, say, just landed at the airport: Firing up a mobile app from Carrentals.com, Priceline or another aggregator will often turn up rates far lower than what you would get quoted just walking up to the counter.)

Now it was time to beat the rate I found in 30 seconds. Granted, it seemed pretty low already, but how hard could it be?

My first stop was Zalyn, a site that sorts through the bewildering array of coupons offered by rental car companies, as well as third-party discounts from credit cards, airlines, AAA and even Costco, showing you only the codes that work. At least that is what it is supposed to do. I put in my dates and location and listed all my memberships and 56 coupons came up, offering savings up to 25 percent. But the first coupon code I tried to apply to a rental didn’t work and neither did the second or the third. After 15 minutes of searching and nothing to show for it, I threw in the towel.

I had higher hopes for AutoSlash. The free site, which has been around since 2010, allows you to input your rental car confirmation code. It then continuously mines reservation channels for better deals on similar rentals, alerting users via email whenever one becomes available. “Rates are fluctuating all the time, especially in the last two weeks before you pick up the car,” said Jonathan Weinberg, AutoSlash founder and chief executive. “So it’s worth checking every few days or, of course, we can do the legwork for you.” (In the past, AutoSlash would even automatically rebook reservations, a feature it dropped under apparent pressure from car rental companies.) I plugged in my original Enterprise reservation code, clicked the track button and crossed my fingers.

In the meantime, I got to work exploring some less conventional rental options. Priceline allows you to name your price on rental cars, just like hotel rooms and flights. The hitch is that if your bid is accepted you have to pay up front and can’t cancel. With that caveat in mind, I put in some ridiculously lowball offers, starting at $1 a day (or about $7 with taxes). That was instantly rejected, as were subsequent offers of $2 and $3 a day. When I realized my rejected bids were approaching the original rate I got from Enterprise, which was for a fully cancelable reservation, I gave up on Priceline.

Maybe car sharing was the answer. Zipcar and similar services were great for getting around my home city, often cheaper than the price of a taxi. Would the same approach work on vacation? Nope. While Vancouver hourly rates for a Zipcar start at about $7, daily rates are around $65. “Zipcar can be convenient if you’re in an urban area, but once you get beyond a few hours it’s definitely cheaper to do a traditional rental,” said Chris Brown, executive editor of the trade publication Auto Rental News. “The car-sharing fleet is still small, and at airports it’s not yet a huge factor.”

I hoped to find better bargains in the growing peer-to-peer rental market, where ordinary people loan out their wheels. Unfortunately, neither RelayRides nor Getaround, two of the most popular peer-to-peer sites, operate in Canada. A search in nearby Seattle turned up RelayRide cars starting at $25 a day, still no match for supercheap traditional rentals. Meanwhile, FlightCar, which allows outgoing fliers to rent out their cars, is available only in a handful of American airports (including Seattle-Tacoma, where I tracked down a compact for $19 a day: a price that included the all-important supplemental liability insurance — more on that below — but limited renters to 100 miles a day).

Bleary eyed, with my browser freezing up from too many open tabs, I was beginning to get discouraged when I got an email from AutoSlash with the subject line “Great News!” Their tireless bots had tracked down a reservation with Hertz for just $10.01 a day, nearly a 25 percent discount over my original rate. In this instance, that worked out to a measly $3 a day savings; but at peak times of the year when rates were higher, or for a longer-term rental, my savings could have been substantial. More important, I had something to show for a day of Internet sleuthing. I clicked through to the AutoSlash site and booked.