Which program give maximum miles for car rentals?
 

Lately I have been getting a mere 50 miles a day for car rentals credited to my DL and UA FF accounts.

When in Europe I recall having gotten 500 miles per rental (even for one day rentals) on my LH account when renting from Europcar. Obviously I can't do that in the U.S. Or can I?

Which FF program gives 500 miles per rental (or more)?

Thanks in advance for your replies. Hopefully this should prove useful for many other people as well.



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-Otto

Avis always gives me 500 miles per rental to my BA account, and runs frequent double and triple miles promotions.

Virgin Flying Club offer 1,000 Virgin miles with most car rentals.

This easily beats the BA bonus offers as (i) the BA bonuses often don't post (there is a thread in the BA forum about this) and (b) even when they do, they rarely match the VS regular offer.

Does a Virgin flight need to be taken in association with that car rental?

Qantas gives 700 miles per rental outside of Australia for Avis/Budget/Thrifty/Hertz.

No, not in my experienceas a UK member - I normally use Avis.

This is from a spreadsheet I try to keep up to date. Slashes between two numbers mean either/or, usually based on car class or some other distinction. Other slashes, number/word, can be read as "per". In the one case where we have both, 1/2per$ means "one or two points per dollar spent".

This chart is not comprehensive, not necessarily up to date, and should be verified by your own homework.

Legalistics aside, the winners are Virgin (VS) as mentioned above, and Lan Chile (LA). BONUS: Both of these can xfer into HHonors points, making those orphans useful. In transferring to HH, the transfer rate of SA makes it equal to VS.

Warning: MX will NOT transfer non flight miles to HH.
[This message has been edited by Rut Dog (edited 09-27-2003).]

Wow! What excellent advice. FT at its best! Thanks everybody!

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-Otto

[This message has been edited by OttoGraham (edited 09-27-2003).]

It's also interesting to compare how many rentals it takes to score a free trip. My vote then goes to Southwest, where a mere 32 rentals gets you a free trip in the US; fewer if you catch double miles promos.

When you use an airline that gets you only 50 miles, it will take 500 rentals to get a free trip.

JP

I don't know if it is still the case, but when I was in Germany and rented a car from Sixt through their "Handy-Service" (mobile phone hotline), I would get 3,000 LH miles for each rental, which was GREAT http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif.

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Please have a look at my round-the-world travel blog and leave some comments - thanks :-).

Thank you Roger and Rut Dog! Top down for a Virgin sounds good to me. Do you have a link for that program Attorney28?

I have found that most of the car rental companies' European offices routinely try to cheat you out of your car rental miles. The only one I have ever had to post without a lot of hassle was Budget from the UK. Same in the Caribbean.

Thanks for the great list, Rut Dog. It will serve as a valuable reference tool.

KL gives 500 miles n Avis rentals. No flight necessary. I think AC also gives 500 miles per rental. Only the U.S. airlines are down to 50 miles/day. I am not sure it's even worth bothering with the tax the car rental companies are charging at least in the U.S.

The tax paid at National for AA or NWA miles
is only 6c/day, not the 50c as per other airlines.
mike



[This message has been edited by MIKESILV (edited 10-02-2003).]

I always put my Avis rentals on my Lufthansa M&M card. Rental does not have to be in conjunction with a LH flight and you get 500 M&M points. LH also frequently runs promos for a 2500 point bonus. I got this bonus two times this year for a total of 6000 miles for two rentals.

Good info here. 50 miles/day just hasn't cut it for me (can remember back to the days of 1,000 DL miles/rental). To add further insult, some companies are trying to turn it into a profit center with the per-day "service charges" instead of just passing on the 6-cent tax.

Also bogus are the double- and triple-mile coupon deals, as those require codes that almost always lock out the use of other, better coupons to reduce the rate or provide a free rental day.

The only deal left that might sway a purchase decision for me is Hertz for 400 Korean miles. And I probably never qualify if they go by the book, but if you plunk it in on the website the credit usually goes through automatically.

I think it'd be more valuable at this point if car companies just exited the FF business and had more generous loyalty programs of their own for free rental days. Alamo's defunct True Blue seemed the closest thing I've seen to that.

Certainly not my experience. I mainly use Avis, and sometimes Hertz, and in these cases, miles have appeared promptly in my VS account, and on occasion (promotions) BA and KL.

I also was annoyed at the paltry 50 miles a day (plus the dumb FF tax) so I started putting my "miles" on my Hyatt Gold Passport. Apparently there's no tax on hotel points. And I was getting 250 points per rental, which is like spending $100 at Hyatt to get that many points. There was a double points deal earlier this summer w/Avis. Downside: it takes forever for these points to post (Do I blame Avis or Hyatt?)

I signed up for Virgin's FF program and got a number, but since I didn't take a flight yet did not receive the top secret Avis rental code. Does anyone have it here? I have been too lazy to ask/search on the Virgin board

You don't need the Virgin code. I use other codes and get the miles.

If you want to use a Virgin code, try Z333300 for Avis. I don't think the rates are great - around the same as you would get with other airlines - so you might find other codes better value.

I use Air Canada for my car rental miles.
Alamo® Rent A Car
Avis®
Budget
Hertz
National Car Rental®
Thrifty Car Rental®

All the above I get 500 miles per rental. Actually, I put Thrifty on GlobalPass for 500 miles per rental.

It all adds up!

You may also want to consider 500 Marriott points for Hertz rentals.

WN's 0.5 credit (and there are often double credit offers) is worth more than 500 miles. It's 1/32nd of a free trip.

I do the Qantas 700 miles/rental...whether it's 1 day or 100 days....you can take AA flights with these miles. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

After reading this information I set up a Virgin account and asked Avis to credit my miles there. 1000 per rental seemed too good to pass up. Alas I got but 500. They did post though and quickly. I personally have never had issues with Avis miles posting. I have sent them various places including: UAL, NW and Starwood.

If 500 is the standard for Virgin I think I will switch to Lufthansa cince I am UAL Premier. Hopefully I can snare some of those Lufthansa bonuses mentioned above. Does anybody know how often they extend the bonuses?

Last promo that LH ran went form Feb. 1 - Sept. 30, 2003. Bonus was only good for rentals in Germany for this promo but I know they have had other promos with worldwide rentals. I got a total of 5k for two rentals while in Germany this year. Looking at my LH statement, I also got a 2500 bonus from Avis twice last year but I do not remember what the promo deal and rules were.

I recently began directing my Avis rentals to BA... so far none have posted, although avis.com advises the miles request has gone through. Can anyone tell me the normal window for BA miles to post from Avis?

1,000 miles is the standard for Virgin. At least, it is for Avis and me.

Could you be on a contracted rate offering the lower amount?

If you actually want the airmiles to appear in your account without havng to contact the comapny several times you might want to avoid Alamo. I'm still trying to get miles from a July and September rental. Carefully asked the clerk each time if my airmiles account had been entered as I handed them my airmiles card so that they could check it against their records. Oh yes sir it is.
Yeah right!

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"A day without Points/Miles is like a day without SUNSHINE"

How do you know the difference between a contracted rate and a non-contracted rate? I use a variety of AWD numbers to get the best rate.

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 http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/wink.gif. When they entered 'VF' in their system, sunshine broke out http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif.

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. :D

What airline?

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