I've been renting from Budget for about six months now, and I'm going to make a bold statement: Perfect Drive is the best reward program I've seen - in any category. It usually isn't easy to compare hotels to cars to airlines, but from what I've seen, this one is so far ahead of anything else I've seen, it doesn't matter.

For me, the simple math is this: Spend $240 at Budget (including taxes, fuel, etc.), and that translates to 1 free rental day - or about $45 worth of merchandise. That's like getting paid 15 to 20 cents on the dollar!!

By comparison, Hertz requires $600 to get a free day - with no march options - which translates to 7 or 8 cents on the dollar (rough estimate: free day = $40-45).

Honestly, I seems too good to last. I wonder if the double-points-on-every-rental or the 20%-discount-on-everything will be reduced at some point.

The downside, of course, is this: Budget is terribly inconsistent from location to location, and their customer service sometimes SUCKS. Hertz is almost always on-the-money with customer service, more frequent shuttles, newer cars for Gold members, etc.

However, it's a price I'm willing to pay for the great rewards as long as the service isn't TOO bad. A Taurus with 20K miles isn't much different from one with 2K miles to me.

Other thoughts? Is there another program out there that stacks up with this one?