Well I successfully made it to Arizona in my one-way rental. Thought I’d offer an update for those who may need to do something similar in the future.

A small bit of background- I was told by a Budget agent that rental car availability gets tight in November in El Paso. He mentioned thanksgiving. Seems fishy as it’s still pretty early in the month and everyone I talked in ELP was shocked that there were no rental cars available to book.

I took the advice of Autoslash and looked at weekly rentals and that opened up more availability. (Unfortunately Autoslash search didn’t turn up anything other than a Priceline link that then told me there was no availability, so I wasn’t able to book through Autoslash - but I do have a separate rental coming up on Saturday booked via Autoslash!)

The cheapest one-way weekly rental was Alamo. I booked it online and was actually able to adjust the dates at the counter to pay only for 2 days rather than a week. The counter agent assured me that I would face no other charges/drop fees/penalties so I’m hoping that’s actually true. The rate was $53/day before taxes and fees which seemed decent for a one-way rental for 2 days.

I’m pretty ecstatic about not having to drive back the 5+ hours to ELP. Flying was out as the flights were connecting through Phoenix or LAX.