With car rental should I pay now or pay later?
- By
- Aparna Patel
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- 31 Jul, 2023
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As with any pre-pay rate, the answer is “it depends”.
Car rentals are one of the last areas of travel where you can cancel a booking at the last moment or even “no-show” without paying any penalty. Try that with a flight, a hotel, a tour, etc and in almost all cases you’re going to be out at least a percentage, if not the entire cost.
Rental car pre-pay normally means that if you want to cancel or even change your booking, then you’re going to have to pay at least a fee. So in effect, you’re giving up some flexibility and taking some (financial) risk in order to get an (apparent) saving.
So what it really comes down to is how much is the savings? Normally pre-pay savings are only 10-15%, which is frequently no more than you can get using other promotion codes with the rental company, or affiliate discounts like AAA (car club) membership discounts that are offered by many rental companies.
For such as small (if any) discount, the answer if simple – no, Pre-pay rates are NOT a good idea and should be avoided at all costs.
However, there are exceptions. For example, consider this quote from Hertz :
In this case pre-paying drops the price from 68 British Pounds to 39 Pound – a saving of around 43%! Unless you think it’s likely that you’d be likely to cancel/no-show for the reservation, then obviously the pre-pay rate would be a great deal!
I’m not going to try and answer this any better then FoxNews Article did.
The gist of the story is basically that car rental companies are getting at least some money from their fleet even if you cancel or don’t show up. From what I just gathered on Avis the cancellation fees are $25.00 if you do it more then 6 hours before or $100 if you are a No Show or doing it less then 6 hours before the pick-up time.
The article also mentions that there are potential discounts that you could be missing out on once you prepay.
Credit:stackoverflow.com‘