invisible

Hello everybody,

My wife will be arriving at SFO in mid-june and will need car for 12 days. Did brief kayaking search but except Fox and Dollar prices are coming like >$65/day - twice the budget she planned for car.

Any suggestions? Unfortunately using Uber/Lyft is not an option - she will need to make 5-6 trips per day.

Are there any discount codes available for weekly and more rentals? Is Dollar OK to rent from? Any pitfalls?

Asking because we left US >5 years ago and last time I rented car at SFO for personal reasons was >10 years ago. Things have changed since that...

IAHtraveler

I'd try 2 things:

1. Pickup off-site. You can probably save a ton of taxes if you don't pickup on site for a rental that long

2. Break it up. Not sure your dates, but often Thurs-Mon are cheaper (sometimes $10-20/day). Maybe you can do a 4 day rental and an 8 day to reduce rates?

invisible

For #1 - do I need to check all rental companies off-SFO locations or there are some well-known places?

For #2 - is this applicable to all rental companies or again, there are well know ones?

And the last question - any recommended companies?

AutoSlash

I'd suggest checking three different places:

1) An address in the vicinity of the airport, like Millbrae (there's a cluster of rental offices around the Westin and the Marriott). A search for Millbrae on an OTA (like Expedia, Priceline, or, shameless plug, us) should also pick up other off-airport options in San Bruno and South San Francisco. All of those would be a very short cab ride from the airport...or you might even find a nearby hotel with an airport shuttle and use their shuttle. The San Bruno options would be an easy one-stop BART ride.

2) Check rates in downtown San Francisco. BART makes it pretty convenient to get from the airport downtown. There are lots of rental options within a few blocks of the Powell Street station. We get a lot of bookings for pick-ups on O'Farrell Street.

3) If she has the time and inclination, I'd also check downtown San Jose (and maybe the SJC airport, too). The rental companies consider SJC a different market, so rates are set independently there of demand in SFO. It's not too difficult to get from SFO to San Jose by CalTrain; there's a Hertz and an Enterprise only a few blocks from San Jose Diridon station, and both will pick you up from the station if you call them. SJC airport is a relatively painless shuttle bus ride away from the Santa Clara CalTrain station, and all the major brands are represented there.

She could also do the same in Oakland or at OAK airport, both of which are relatively easy to get to by BART.

It's all a balance of how much savings those options offer and how much inconvenience she's willing to endure to save whatever amount of money those options offer.

It can be worth checking, but it's impossible to answer in advance (without looking at the dates) whether it will help with any companies, much less all of them. If there's one thing we've learned about rental rates after helping north of a million customers, it's that there's no such thing as predicting rental rates.

As for specific companies...rental cars are largely a commodity, so you're fine to shop on price. That said, we sort of break companies down into three tiers:

Premium brands: Avis, Hertz, National
Value brands: Budget, Dollar, Thrifty, Alamo, Enterprise (and Sixt, to some extent)
Discount brands: Fox, Advantage, E-Z
...and then there's Payless.

There are also some considerations about which rental agencies handle out-of-town issues the best, which may come into play if she's planning on doing any road trips out of the area while she has the car. We covered that topic recently over in this post.

guv1976

Can she pick up the car by June 11? If so, check out this offer from Budget:

https://www.budget.com/en/offers/us-...jessicasimpson

invisible

She flies in on 15th.

invisible

First of all, thank you for your detailed and insightful comments. We finally settled to pick up and drop off car at at Enterprise in San Mateo and 12 day rental would come as $320 while taking Uber to/from there.

However I did go and setup alert at your system to see if original pickup/drop/off at SFO would be any better. Today I got notification. Checked link and see following:

Great, I am thinking. But I decided to take a closer look at T/C and there is following:

So taking $338 from above and adding:
$19 transportation charge
3.5% from total - tourism surcharge - $11.83
license fee - no idea, let's take 1.5% per day - $5.07 - 12 days - $60.84
Recovery fee - $37.55
Transportation fee - $19

Add this together - $485 and that's without Airport fee. So $180 savings mysteriously disappeared. and with the airport fee it will be the same $510.

Is above calculation correct?

AutoSlash

The $338 is the total price including all taxes and fees. The actual base rental rate, which for whatever reason didn't come through SABRE (hence the "the price breakdown is not available at this time" note), which is probably something like around $200, doesn't include the taxes and airport fees, but once those are added, the total comes out to $338.

If you want to be sure, you can pull up the reservation directly on the rental company website after booking and see a full price breakdown. (You can cancel at any time if anything isn't to your liking.)

Might want to check San Mateo on our site as well or submit your existing reservation at http://www.autoslash.com/track -- good chance we can come up with something quite a bit lower than $320 there, too.

invisible

OK, thanks for update and confirmation. I will definitely use it in future.