After a bit of time optimizing (perhaps too much) how to travel on the cheap, I’ve come across a few tricks to getting cheaper car rentals and looking for flights — time to share what I’ve learned.

car rentals

Renting a car can be quite annoying for anyone under the age of 25 - the young driver fee often makes it super expensive. Whenever I rent a car, I compare 3 different rates:

under 25 | hertz with aaa discount

If you’re a AAA member (which costs about $5/month in Texas), you can rent cars from Hertz without having to pay the young driver fee - you just need to be sure to book through this link. There are better discounts available for those over 25, but I’ve found the no-fee price to usually be pretty competitive.

under 25 | lyft

I’ll be checking the Lyft app for rentals more often, as I recently had two great experiences with them - the overall process is super smooth (far better than the traditional companies are doing it), and if you have Lyft Pink then you get some additional benefits (it’s unclear to me if Lyft Pink also gets you a discount compared to non-Pink members, but if so, the $20/month could easily pay for itself).

turo

There’s nothing I know on how to “game the system” on Turo, but it’s a website worth checking out just in case some cars are available for much cheaper. The primary downsides of Turo are you might not get the same level of coverage from your regular car insurance, nor the perks from your credit card.

autoslash

The mother-of-all-search-engines for car rentals, Autoslash is a super effective way to search all of the rental car companies with many of the discounts available - e.g. holding a certain credit card, being a part of an airline’s loyalty program, being a member of AAA or Costco, etc.

loyalty programs

Regardless of where you rent your car from, it can be helpful to use the various status match programs available from the different rental agencies. I had Gold status with Marriott from a credit card, which I was able to use to get top-tier status with National, which in turn can be used to get top-tier status with most rental agencies.

flights

A shorter section, but I'll always look for flights through Google Flights and Southwest (since their results don’t show up through Google Flights). If I have a ton of credit card points racked up, I’ll also look through AwardHacker to see if there’s a way to get the flight for fewer miles - though I often find that the flights aren’t available.