Has anyone used Priceline for a car rental? Are there any gimics to it or is it straight forward?

I can't see how you could get a bad deal on a car rental. Not like bad flight connections of hotels in bad parts of town.

I've used them and it worked fine (we even got upgraded to a minivan) but for the small amount I saved, I'm not sure I'd do it again since it's non refundable and other car rentals don't even require a credit card deposit so you can cancel up to the day of the rental.

Priceline's great for car rental. I'm not sure if this still works, but I generally check going rates on Hotwire first, then shave it 20% or so for a Priceline bid.

There was another thread about this recently - you should search for it. In that thread, I basically changed my mind about the benefits of Priceline car rental, since I booked a rental for a much better savings than I got a few years ago, the last time I tried Priceline for car rental. I agree with the "Bid on Priceline based on Hotwire Price" strategy.

As always, visit BiddingForTravel.com to see bid histories of successful rental car bids.

Andrew

I love Priceline for car rentals. I've paid $18 per day in Tampa for a Hertz mid-sized. Another time, $20, also Hertz.

Forgot to say, I never check Hotwire or biddingfortravel -- I just enter low prices until I win or no longer want to play.

We've had great success w/Priceline for car rentals. We use the biddingfortravel strategy. Probably the best deal we got was in NYC (EWR) for about $25/day (no more than that) and it fell over Xmas. I remember finding rates upwards of $45/day on other travel sites and the agency sites.

It's pretty painless if you know for sure you are going away. They'll still try to get you to pay for an upgrade when you go to pick up the car, but just decline. Oftentimes we get the upgrade anyway because they're actually out of that class of car. (We bid for compacts and hope for a midsize)

One more thing I like is that they use the biggies in car rentals and we've never had a case were the rentals were offsite from the airport--saves time!

We've used them for hotels by bidding *very* carefully for certain neighborhoods but I don't think we will ever use them for flights. In that case, I'd rather pay what I pay than be subjected to ridiculous routings that take hours longer.

Have done it often and usually save half. I check Hotwire so I will know the taxes of the particular place and can know what will be added to my bid. You can make multiple bids if you are bidding far enough in advance.

Thanks for all the replies. I'm going to look into it.

One thing I forgot to ask was, how do you know about mileage restictions (ie unlimited etc?)

I have never run into any mileage restrictions. They use the "big" rental agencies.

It's been unlimited miles everytime we used priceline--I think it says something about that before you bid but double check to make sure I'm right.

I have used Priceline a great deal. For certain places, such as Hawaii, I cannot find a better deal. I always check the prices on biddingfortravel, orbitz, costco and check aaa. discounts before bidding.

Good to know. I've not used Priceline for rental cars before, but think I will now on my next trip.