Car Hire Tips UK

Most of the time when people are getting quotes for car hire they’ll go for either a compact or economy car, based on the logical assumption that these are going to return the best prices; and for the most part you’d be right. However, this is somewhere else where you could sniff out a bargain.

Because most people book economy and compact cars these are in the greatest demand, have the greatest overall fleet and the lowest holding costs for the rental company. The larger car groups are in much lower volume and have far higher costs if they don’t get rented out to customers.

Because of this the rental companies will manage their availability of the larger car groups as carefully as possible to avoid getting stuck with these cars in the car park. With this in mind if you’re making a last minute booking it’s worth checking the prices on larger cars too as you might be in for a pleasant surprise.

There’s two ways you can benefit from this situation. The first (and most obvious) way is that the rental company may well have priced a larger car cheaper than a car in the smaller but more popular compact category. If this is the case you might as well take advantage right away and get more car for your money.

The second (and less obvious) way to benefit in this situation is to try and get a free upgrade. This method can take a little more cheek on your part but it’s worth asking about free upgrades when you collect your vehicle.

If it’s late in the day on a Friday for example, the station doesn’t want to be stuck with any big cars in the car park, as it could be stuck with them until Monday. If they’re going to be stuck with anything, they’d much rather it was a small car as it’ll cost them less and there’s always the chance that they’ll shift it on Saturday.

In this scenario you could well get a car two or three groups bigger without having to pay any more (or very little more) for the privilege, and the rental station will probably be happy with the deal too, so it’s worth asking.

Car rental rates are usually governed to some extent by length or rental so you can get hourly rates, daily rates, weekly rates, even monthly rates if you plan to rent a car as an alternative to short term leasing. In between all of these there are also things like special “weekend” rates (which can be as long as 4 days) and a range of other rates depending on when the rental company needs to move it’s fleet around.

All very interesting you might think, but how does that benefit you? Well, just having an idea that this is how the rates work means that with a little flexibility in your travel arrangements you could save yourself a lot of money.

To demonstrate this, let’s take an example of two rental requests with very small differences to the rental but huge impact to the cost.

Rental 1
Check out on Thursday morning at 11:30 am
Return on Monday at 12:30pm

Rental 2
Check out on Thursday at 12:00 noon
Return on Monday at 11:30am

While the two rentals look very similar they would be charged very differently. For instance Car Hire Company X will charge Rental 1 out as a 5 day rental on their daily rates, but Rental 2 from the same company would be a 4 day rental on their discounted weekend rates. So, half an hour or so adjustments to your journey can make a big difference.