Today, I am going to San Francisco on my $14 round trip flight (See September 14, 2012 blog). Sherri and Pete also jumped on the deal. Once in San Francisco we looked at a couple of options for transportation in order to get around. Sherri found BART for $17.00 per person. While this sounded like a good option it limited us based on the BART schedule and destinations we wanted to include.
Sherri and I both then started looking up rental cars. I checked Costco ($116), Airport rental cars ($92) which generally has good prices, Autoslash ($92), my credit union savings site ($92), and Avis directly ($96). What I found was the taxes were almost 50% of the price.
Remember the July 9, 2012 blog on using Priceline for bidding for hotel rooms? This time I used Priceline for bidding for a rental car. I started my bid at $28 (without taxes) for an economy car. Priceline said the bid was rejected but for $32 I could get a car or try rebidding by changing the parameters. I changed my bid from an economy car to compact and bid $30. This was again rejected but it allowed me to go back and bid again on the economy car again with a slightly higher bid. This time I bid $30 for the economy car.
I received a "Congratulations" on my bid. Here is my result including all taxes:
I paid $53.49 (or $13.37 per person) for a Budget rental car. This is just a little over half the price of all the car rental websites I had previously checked.
So don't forget to use Priceline when trying to find the lowest prices on hotels as well as car rentals.
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