Virgin may offer a great 1,000 miles with Avis, but I find that half my rentals don't post!!!! This has to be the most maddening of AVIS's car rental partners. Also intriguing is the argument you get into with the Avis agents when they tell you there is no such program as Virgin's.

I'm sticking mostly with BA for the miles, except at LAX, where for some reason my VS miles really do post. (I go there every couple of weeks, so this can add up, but it's irritating that I can't get them to post at, say, SFO without a bunch of calls).

Virgin Atlantic's normal airline code is VS. For some reason, Avis used to use VF for Virgin; in the US, they often denied that Virgin was a partner and I had to educate them each time, politely but firmly . When they entered 'VF' in their system, sunshine broke out .

Anyway, my VS number is in my Avis profile and miles credit automatically. I just checked that my two rentals from two weeks ago in South Africa were in my account - yes, they were.

So far as contract rates are concerned, I guess you would know if you were on a contract rate - a little like no-miles prices for air fares or hotels.

The reason I think the answer to the question is Virgin Atlantic is twofold:
- 1,000 miles per rental (for me, at least)
- VS still offer transatlantic awards based on 40,000 miles - most US carriers and BA ask for 50,000.

So one rental = 1/40th of a London-New York round trip. Not bad.

Thrifty employee here. My location doesn't charge any "per-day service charge," but I can tell you that miles are not a profit-making thing.

Each mileage transaction costs our franchise $5. (That's a flat fee regardless of whether it's 50 miles for one day or a two-week long rental with a 700 mile transaction.)

And, those taxes are capped: airlines which incur a $0.50-per-day FF surcharge are capped at $2.00, and airlines which incur a $0.06-per-day FF surcharge are capped at something close to $1.50, I think. So, even if a renter keeps the car for a month, we're still losing anywhere from $3 to $4.50 on a customer who requests miles.

The only reason we do it is because a) we're required to by Thrifty corporate and b) customers will sometimes rent from us because we give miles.

As RustyC expressed wishes for, Thrifty does have an in-house rewards program. It's attached to our BlueChip express rental program (which is free to sign up for -- frankly, I don't know why everyone doesn't do it, since it makes everything much quicker). When creating your BlueChip profile, you have the option of selecting either an airline frequent flier program or BlueChip Rewards. With BlueChip Rewards, you receive a free rental day after every 16 rental days. Currently, Thrifty is offering double credits so you can get a free rental day with every 8th rental day (promotion valid through December, I believe). Why 16 instead of, say 14 (two weeks), I don't know, but that's what they do.

Before we started BlueChip Rewards last spring, we participated in GoldPoints, a collaboration between Thrifty, TGI Friday's, some flower delivery company, and some other places, but it wasn't very popular and probably cost us too much money.

Besides, BlueChip Rewards will (hopefully) draw more people into the BlueChip program, which is nice for us because a) it kind of brings a little bit of loyalty to Thrifty and b) summertime lines go a lot quicker when you're dealing with BlueChip customers! Of course, BlueChips tend to be more snooty and always come back to haunt us later ("My car wasn't completely clear of snow and warmed up for me. I demand a free day!" which, of course, we have to give them as "service is guaranteed." Oh yeah, like we're going to idle a car unattended for 3 hours while we wait for a BlueChip who's more than likely going to arrive late or even no-show on us. And sorry the walk to the cars is so confusing and long. Blame the airport, not us! We can't control where they tell us to park the cars....Sorry, I'll get off of my soapbox now, but I do have to say that working in the travel industry has made me cynical.).

Jackal

Very interesting info! Thanks, jackal!

I think I only get 50 AA miles from Avis for renting.

I use LH for all my Hertz rentals. 500 miles per rental with no flight requirement. Also, unlike some other airlines where I have had problems in the past, my miles always post without having to follow-up with Hertz or LH.

As pointed out before in this thread, only 32 car rentals gets a free ticket on Southwest. With the current quadruple points for Hertz rentals (2 points/rental instead of 0.5), a free ticket is only 8 rentals away. Although I don't fly Southwest, the tickets make great gifts to family and friends.

I get 650 miles per rental with avis, thrifty and hertz. And 500 miles with budget. Not bad at all.

What airline?

For me, it's not. That's why I earn car rental points.

Has anyone looked at the value earned from crediting rentals to the car companies' own programs (as jackal discussed) compared to airline/hotel miles? I am especially interested in comparison's with Hertz's program.

Since the car rental program (at least for Hertz) is dollar based, and the mileage is rental or day based, then there's some kind of balance between the price for the rental and which way is the most efficient. For example, if you end up with a $10 two-day rental after a coupon, it's probably better to get WN credits or miles/points in some airline or hotel program rather than just getting 10 ZE1 points with Hertz. On the other hand, if that's a $100 rental, then you'd get the same miles/points for air or hotel, but you'll get 100 ZE1 points for the Hertz.

In general, I just assign all my Hertz rentals to ZE1 points, though with some of the promotional codes and short, cheap rentals then it's probably better to assign those to another program. For my situation, none of the alternatives are worth bothering getting points instead of the Hertz points. For certain non-US based airline carriers it might be worth it, but I'd want either HHonors or *wood points which aren't an option through Hertz.

Though if you're never going to get enough points with Hertz to redeem for anything, there's no reason to start collecting them in the first place.