I’m helping a friend that is planning a trip to Germany in a couple of months and wanted to get a rental car.  First, I shopped around at places like Kayak and Orbitz, and then I thought of trying Costco Travel to see how much they could help with the price.  As it happens, your Costco membership makes quite a difference.  In the end I went with a rental from Avis that was less than any of the other rental companies because of my Costco membership.  Go Costco!

In case you are unaware, your Costco membership has several benefits in the travel area: discounted hotel and cruise rates or cheaper tickets to the Disney parks, for example.  At the Costco Travel website you can find out all about their current deals on their numerous vacation packages, as well as find information about their on-going savings for hotels and rental cars.  For the rental cars, you can go through the Costco Travel website to book your car and they will fill in the appropriate discount code for your membership, though you may still have to put in the information to receive the additional coupon deals (these have some little code as well).

Currently, Costco has deals with Alamo, Avis, Budget, Enterprise, Hertz, and National rental car agencies.  So, that probably has you covered no matter where you’re going.  All of these companies have a basic discount for Costco members of up to 20 – 25%, except for Enterprise which only has 5% off for Costco members (they’re not cheap enough as a baseline to only offer 5% off, honestly).  In addition there are a variety of coupons that you can also use for things like a free upgrade, or an extra discount for renting over the weekend or for a whole week; these offers vary by agency.   Unfortunately for me, all of these extra coupons are only available in the U.S. or North America, not Europe.  But I was more curious about how much of a discount I would really end up getting.  So, I did a little comparison shopping at all of the rental car agencies.

I wanted to rent an intermediate sized car to pick up in Frankfurt and drop off 13 days later in Munich, plus I wanted a GPS system.  And this is what I found:

German Audi A3 Rental from Avis

As you can pretty easily see, Avis was the clear winner here even with the addition of the GPS system that no one else besides Hertz offered. I do feel the need to point out that apparently Budget and Enterprise do not offer their discount for European car rentals through Costco.  However, they are probably worth a look if renting in the U.S. or Canada.  But most perplexing of all is National.  They act like they offer you a ‘discount’ and it is certainly a different price, but it is actually $55.07 more to rent with the Costco ‘discount’.  What the hell is that about?  I was so confused I did the comparison more than once and double checked that all of my parameters were identical.  Sadly, they were.   What’s even more interesting to me is that both Alamo and National (as you can see above I’m getting the same exact car) are serviced in Germany by Europcar, so I would have really thought there wouldn’t be so much discrepancy in pricing.  I guess the lesson for me, is to never rent from National.  I would also like to draw attention to the ridiculously high Hertz rate.  Granted it does have the GPS unit, however, for the difference (just over $300.oo more for the exact same car vs. Budget) in price you would be better off to buy your own GPS unit for your trip. For comparison, the best I could find using Kayak, was through CarRentals.com and offered by Sixt Rent a Car.  It was for a Peugeot 407, manual, air conditioning, and 4 doors but no GPS system, for a total of $702.24.  So, still quite a bit more than the Costco Travel discounted rate for my Avis rental.

I feel really good about the discount at Avis that I was able to receive using the Costco membership discount.  And I’m glad that I did this comparison to see how much less expensive a rental through Avis is than Hertz (which is where we used to always rent from because Dave had their membership thing through work).  Even without the Costco discount, you are still able to save on the rental from Avis, even when compared to the Alamo discounted rate.  And as a usability person, I also need to point out that Avis has the most user-friendly website too; much easier and quicker to use than the others.