Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Amazing Car Rental

I'm back from a long weekend during which I decided to escape from the city. Usually when I go to visit family or friends, I end up taking the train, but this time I was able to share a rental car. The amazing thing was how cheap it was! Enterprise was having some kind of summer weekend special, so the weekend days were only $15, and then my friend's corporate rate for weekdays was only $30. This was for pickup and drop-off in Stamford, CT. From NYC, it's not that inconvenient-- Enterprise doesn't have a location right at the train station like Hertz and Avis do, but they'll pick you up and drop you off there for free, or reimburse you if you had to take a taxi.
My friend definitely "worked it"... we got a 10% discount for having to wait a while to pick up our car. Then when we returned the car, she got them to take off the charges for the extra insurance. Our final total for 4 days was just under $100, which is unheard of, at least in the metro NY area. Of course on top of that we had to pay for round-trip train tickets to Stamford (about $20 each) and gas (about $100 total), but when you split this between two people, it's only about $120 each, which is way better than the almost $200 per person a round-trip on the train would cost, and the car allowed us the flexibility of me going off to see family and her going off to see other friends and then picking me up again for the trip back to NYC.
But if it had just been me, and if the trip had been a longer one, I'm not sure I would have gone for it. $3.37 a gallon for gas! This was my introduction to the $45 fill-up, and I did not like it.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

My wife and I went to Detroit for a few days. I had reserved a compact car for $12/day, but the car rental place was out of compact and mid-size so they ended up giving us a full-size car for $12/day.

(There were probably taxes added to that; I don't recall).

Contrast that to Denver where I frequently wind up paying $60/day for a compact car. I guess it's all about location -- Detroit apparently isn't quite the destination city it used to be :)

Anonymous said...

~$10 /day car rental is not uncommon except for in ny
http://www.carrentals.com/

Anonymous said...

I went to Detroit for a few days.

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