Originally Posted by
dwbf11
YMMV. Usually third-party sites like Costco or Priceline will not entitle you to the benefits of status or points-earning but some folks have reported being able to take advantage of these things depending on the station and how they ring up the reservation.
FWIW, unlike with hotels, this actually isn't the case with car rentals. As long as you're booking a standard pay-later reservation, you can earn points and use your status benefits just like booking directly through the rental company's website. In fact, on the rental car company's end, aside from a little note tucked away on a sub-screen indicating it was booked through a travel agent that earns a commission, it is indistinguishable from a standard reservation booked through the website or rental company's 800 number.
This is true regardless of which travel agency (OTA or brick-and-mortar) the reservation is booked through or whether the reservation is booked with a corporate discount code (which is what CostcoTravel does behind the scenes and why AutoSlash can almost always find the same rates that CostcoTravel can, because all they're doing is searching standard GDS-published pay-later rates and adding discount codes, and we search the exact same discount codes, plus thousands of others.)
What
doesn't earn points are
prepaid reservations booked through third-party OTAs, since those are either net rates negotiated individually between the OTA and the rental company or booked through third-party wholesalers. But as long as you're booking a "pay later" or "pay at counter" rental, the source doesn't matter, and we have never seen an instance of someone not earning their points or being able to use their status benefits (except in the rare case of a technical glitch--there was a time a year or two ago where Priceline made some changes to their website and wasn't properly passing Hertz Gold numbers through on pay-later bookings, but that was a technical issue, not a policy issue, and we pushed them to fix it pretty quickly).