Other Car Rental Programs/Partners (ie. Alamo, Enterprise, Sixt) - Avoiding airport and underage charges at Enterprise

I plan to rent from an Enterprise airport location, but with all the airport fees and under 25 fees, the total goes from $150 to about $300. Does anyone have experience avoiding these surcharges? i.e. if I ask really, really nicely and say the secret passphrase, can I avoid the silly underage fee? Looking at Enterprise's non-airport locations, it doesn't even seem to apply anyway.

(I'd be willing to take a taxi to the non-airport location, except they close too soon.)

stophands, welcome to FlyerTalk! If you run a search, this has been covered in several threads. The short answer is no, unless you are able to rent under some sort of a corporate account that has the under 25 fees negotiated away. The under 25 fees will also apply at the non-airport locations. As for the airport fees, the rental companies are required to collect these as part of their agreement to do business at the airport. Unfortunately, no secret passphrases... ;)

You're pretty much out of luck unless your renting for work and the place you work for, like the previous poster stated, have an agreement with Enterprise to waive the underage surcharge. Just a word of advice, if your thinking about renting from a non airport branch and thinking about returning to the airport, you may get hit with a pretty hefty drop charge because the branch often time need to send someone to go pick up that car to bring it back... also if you do take a cab to the local branch, that can get costly depending on how far it is and even cabs, depending on the airport, may even charge an airport access fee and other type of surcharge. So depending on the airport, it may just be just as cost effective to just rent from the airport branch.... Also the rental agencies are smarter than you think so don't try to lie or say something that ins't true becuase if they find out, that may be the last time you rent from that rental agency again... You may not care, but one day your personal car will breakdown and often time, enterprise may be the only option in the area and you may need to rent a car from them. Keep in mind, Enterprise does have one of the lowest underage surcharge in the industry based on my experience when I rented cars when I was under 25. However, my advice, is to call up the branch directly and talk to a manger and see what they can do, explain to them why you want the fee waived, worst they can do is say no... but its worth the effeort because sometime they may say yes... if you don't explain why you want it waive and just demand for it to be waive, I bet they'll say no right away. (and this apply to everything from renting cars to flying to pretty much everything else you can think of)

Thanks for the quick replies. I guess in some sense it's reassuring to know that I'm not the first one to have asked about this. I'll probably still call around, and let you guys know what comes of it and my plans.

Search for 'Brown University Enterprise rental agreement' or something similar on your favorite search engine for getting the code that'll waive the underage fee. Try looking around for the UMich. code that shaves a few extra dollars off the base rate (in addition to waiving the underage fee).

Even if they say you will be assessed an underage fee, you may get lucky. I rented a car at an airport location with a $10 underage fee (as said earlier, this is much better than the $25 a day everyone else wanted to charge me). When I returned the car to the garage, the Enterprise employee checked it for damage, checked the gas, and then printed out a charge slip for me to sign. It wasn't until later when I happened to glance at my confirmation email that I noticed the charge slip I signed was for less than it was supposed to be -- somehow the underage fee didn't make it to the little handheld check-in device/charge slip printer the employee in the garage had. Never showed up on my credit card later, either.

My only advice about avoiding the underage fee would be to just try to look old and get an employee who is bored or disgruntled or just doesn't care. That happened to my back when I was 24 when I rented a car from Enterprise in a large Texas city at a downtown location and upon returning the car, the woman at the office printed out my receipt and after leaving the office I noticed it was $30 less than it was supposed to be. Lucky me.

I find it funny that I get carded when ordering alcohol and so apparently I look like I could be 21 or less and yet they don't even look at my license when renting a car and just automatically think I'm older than 25.

Or rent from National. There are a multitude of codes on the "Contract ID that Works Well" thread on the National forum that waive the age-discrimination fee. You'll not only get (probably) a lower rate, you'll have a much better selection of cars with lower mileage, better hours, and no hard sell on the insurance you won't need.