Hertz - When weekly is cheaper than 3 day daily?

I have a rental coming up where I need a car for 3 days, Sunday am to Wednesday am. The weekly rate is MUCH cheaper than the daily rate for 3 days. Is there any downside to doing a weekly rental and returning early? Will they charge me the daily rate anyway?

I have a rental coming up where I need a car for 3 days, Sunday am to Wednesday am. The weekly rate is MUCH cheaper than the daily rate for 3 days. Is there any downside to doing a weekly rental and returning early? Will they charge me the daily rate anyway?

It's quite possible you will be charged for 3 days at the higher rate if you return early.

If that happened to me , i would have it out with the Gold desk, and explain the "emergency" that required my early return. :cool:

As already stated, you will likely be charged the higher daily rate if your return is anything other than what is booked. Rental car rates are extremely specific to time and day. Having worked in both industries I can honestly say they’re more complex than airline fare rules. Take the “emergency” approach if necessary and see what happens. Customers almost always get what they want, especially Gold customers.

Sun-Wed was a troublesome rental for me a while back too, but the weekly rate was not cheaper in my case. (I tried everything to get it lower, and could have kept it the extra couple days too because it was local.)

The official line is, as others have stated, to use a weekly rate and/or weekly coupon, you must keep at least 5 days.

If your time is flexible at all you should try picking up Saturday night. This helped my rates on at least one occasion. (Also, very early on Sunday morning could help too, I'm talking 6-8am, or even just 1am Sat night if you can do that.) You'll just have to keep trying times to see what works. Don't be afraid to back it off even just an hour or half an hour; sometimes that helps. (In your case it'll probably be the pickup time that's sensitive, not the drop-off since by then you're well into the midweek.)

If you're not flexible, good luck with returning early. The only real risk is that they charge you a higher daily rate than you might have gotten by reserving ahead of time. But that seems unlikely if 3 days already prices more than a week.

A rental comprised of 3 to 4 "daily" rates (e.g., not weekend, not weekly) is actually a pretty good sweetspot for Priceline. I don't ordinarily use Priceline for car rentals because I rarely have a personal rental that fits this category, but if you do, it's worth considering. This happens to be one of the rare scenarios where effective CDP/PC/Rate Code use isn't very good at dropping the rates very far.

The 1- and 2-day weekday rentals are good sweetspots for the 500-pt #1 Awards Free Days, if you have the points... Maybe try some permutations of breaking on the rental into two, with a weekend day and a couple of free days. (Yes, you'd have to switch cars.)

Final option - you might go to the mid-tier agencies like Alamo or Dollar. I've found that their weekday rates don't spike as high as Hertz's, and the good National rate codes (see the "sticky" FT thread on their board) tend to work pretty well on weekday rentals.

(This all assumes that cost is a primary concern here and there is significant opportunity to save money. None of my options are as time-efficient as just booking it through Hertz, paying the high rates, and being done with it.)

I frequently see Seattle weekly rates lower than 3 weekdays. It's a pretty common scenario, and their system will automatically re-price the early return to be three daily rates.