Top 10 Sites for Finding Cheap Car Rentals in 2023
CHEAP CAR RENTALS 2023 – Presented here are the leading ten websites to find car rental agencies for you to select from.
Car rentals tend to be less than enjoyable experiences. For many of us, it entails spending time searching for competitive prices, deciding on extra features, and considering the need and cost of additional car rental insurance.
Thankfully, finding a suitable price doesn’t have to be complicated. While numerous websites claim to offer the best prices, it’s crucial to evaluate their credibility.
Listed below are 10 of the best websites for booking your next rental car:
1. Expedia
A well-established online travel agency since the 1990s, Expedia is a trustworthy option. It’s a popular platform for booking flights, hotels, rental cars, and cruises. The website offers user-friendly navigation with plenty of filtering and sorting options, making it easier to search for specific preferences. The “Great Deal” filter quickly identifies the most affordable choice in each category.
Moreover, when you book a qualifying rental car, you can earn points through the One Key rewards program. This allows you to participate in a loyalty program even when not directly booking through a car rental agency.
Expedia also provides the option to bundle your car rental with flights and/or hotel reservations, often resulting in cost savings.
2. Momondo
Momondo functions as a metasearch engine, similar to Kayak, aggregating prices from various online travel agencies. Instead of completing your booking on Momondo, the platform assists you in finding the best prices and then redirects you to the respective rental agency or online travel agency for actual booking.
While not inherently problematic, Momondo often directs users to lesser-known booking agencies. While this isn’t necessarily negative, it’s important to recognize that factors like customer service, fees, and policies might differ from more familiar companies.
3. Kayak
Like Momondo, Kayak operates as a metasearch engine that gathers price information from different websites in one interface. This is convenient for quickly finding affordable options for car rentals, flights, and accommodations. Kayak offers various tools to refine and organize search results, including a map to locate rental cars and filters for specific policies like free cancellation or unlimited mileage.
When booking through Kayak, creating an account and logging in is recommended to access Private Deals, potentially saving you up to 35%.
The initial price displayed on Kayak usually reflects the “pay now” rate. By clicking the dropdown arrow next to “View Deal,” you can explore alternative choices, including options with a “pay later” price.
4. Orbitz
Orbitz is another substantial online platform with a long history, commonly used for booking flights, accommodations, and rental cars.
The website offers robust filtering and sorting features, allowing users to view the most economical options in each category by selecting the “Great Deal” option. This feature might sound familiar, as it’s also available on Expedia. Many of these online travel agencies are affiliated with the same parent companies and may share similarities. However, price differences can exist among these sites, underscoring the importance of checking multiple sources for the best price.
5. Priceline
Priceline gained popularity through its “Priceline Negotiator” and the “Name Your Own Price” feature, which highlighted opaque bookings where certain details were hidden until after booking completion. However, both of these tools have since been discontinued.
Nonetheless, you can still find great deals on opaque bookings, where specific details are concealed until the transaction is finalized. If you don’t prefer a specific car rental agency, Priceline’s Express Deals are worth exploring. These rentals reveal the agency after booking confirmation, potentially offering a way to save money.
Another type of opaque booking on Priceline is called “Supplier’s Choice.” With this option, you know the rental agency but not the vehicle type until pickup. Regardless of the car type you choose on Priceline, it’s advisable to create an account and log in to access VIP pricing. This simple step can lead to savings of up to 20%, depending on your membership tier, for your car rental.
6. Skyscanner
Similar to Kayak, Skyscanner functions as a search engine, directing users to another website to complete their car rental bookings once a choice is made.
Although Skyscanner can provide competitive prices, initial search results offer limited details about the rental beyond the price. To obtain basic information like the car rental agency, you must click through each individual result.
7. Travelocity
Travelocity is a widely used platform for finding budget-friendly hotels, flights, and rental cars. Despite being powered by Expedia, pricing can differ between the two sites.
Much like other platforms (such as Expedia and Orbitz), Travelocity allows you to filter search results to only show the most affordable options in each category, known as “Great Deals.”
While browsing search results, you can quickly identify options offering free cancellation and those with a non-refundable policy. This information is valuable due to the significant fluctuations in travel plans nowadays.
8. Hotwire
Hotwire introduces an extra platform that offers undisclosed bookings called Hotwire Hot Rate deals. The identity of the rental company remains hidden until the booking is finalized, although Hotwire ensures that it will be associated with one of the following firms:
- Ace
- Advantage
- Alamo
- Dollar
- Enterprise
- Hertz
- National
- Nu
- Sixt
- Thrifty
9. Costco Travel
When you explore Costco Travel for a rental car, you’ll quickly notice that it exclusively features four prominent rental companies: Alamo, Avis, Budget, and Enterprise.
The search results are presented in a clear and easy-to-understand chart format, highlighting the lowest price for each vehicle category in red.
The downside is that reserving a car through Costco Travel requires a membership with Costco. However, if your car rental is part of a vacation package, a Costco Shop card might be included in the deal, potentially covering the membership cost. Additionally, those with an Executive membership can receive a 2% rebate on all their Costco Travel expenses.
10. Rentalcars.com
Rentalcars.com, a search engine owned by the same company as sites like Booking.com, Priceline, and Kayak, specializes in rental cars.
A notable feature of this platform is its user-friendly display of search results, which promptly provides information about options for free cancellation and whether the deal requires an immediate payment or can be settled later. Rentalcars.com also offers undisclosed deals, which can be an effective way to save money if you’re not specific about the exact car type or rental company you’ll receive.
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