How I Saved 91% on My Last Rental Car

I just finished a cross-country road trip and paid $290 for a Hertz SUV rental for nine days. Certainly I have paid less for other car rentals, as I explain in this rental car article.

McCool Travel tip: AAA members have pretty good discount codes with Hertz.

But for this trip in September, my initial quote was a shade over $3,000, which was blinding sticker shock. Thankfully I know a lot of tips and techniques to get lower rental car rates.

Here was my basic process and perhaps some of these car rental tips will help you in the future to book cheaper rentals cars:

1. $3,000 rate was found by a general rental car search between PDX (Portland Oregon airport) and IAD (Dulles airport). That general search was done on a major search engine (probably Expedia). I suspect the rates were higher than usual (they are about $1,200 right now) because of the forest fires at that time.
2. $380 rate was found on my next search. That was a very fast rate reduction but my years of savvy travel expertise knew what to do. I used Costco Travel to look for a car between Corvallis (my ideal pickup spot) and Tysons Corner Virginia (my ideal drop off spot). I also looked at several combos around Portland and dropping off in Northern Virginia. Here are my tips for booking travel on Costco Travel.
3. $320 rate was sent to me. After making a booking (the $380 rate above), I registered my itinerary with Autoslash. Autoslash continually looks for better rates and found one through Hertz. Here are my tips for using Autoslash for car rental discounts.
4. I then found the $290 rate. The Autoslash info wanted me to book a Hertz rate through Priceline which I did. But then I went directly to Hertz website I tried one of my own discount codes. That gave me a rate of $290.
5. Woo hoo!

Here are a couple other of my rental car tips articles:

8 Great Savvy Car Rental Strategies

8 Great Solutions for Rental Car Problems

Cheaper Rental Car Rates With This Hidden Feature