Hawaii Car Rental Deals and Discounts; Cheap Car Rentals in Hawaii

Rent a car in Hawaii and get the best deal: I’ll tell you right now, the lowest discount available is on Hotwire. If you want to know how I decided this, keep reading. If not, go to Hotwire and rent your car for the cheapest price!

I went to Travelocity, Expedia, Travelnow, and Orbitz and tried to rent a car for one week, two weeks in the future. I compared the prices on each site for a full-size car for the major rental agencies. Every single site returned the exact same price.

Then I went to each of the major car rental agencies like enterprise, thrifty, and budget, and I searched for the same time. Each car rental agency returned the same price as the booking agencies did. Ok, so this is their ’set price’ or ‘rack rate’ in hotel terms.

Here’s an example of what the available rental car deals were on a full size car.

enterprise: $342.28
advantage : $342.31
All other companies returned a rate of between $405 and $469

This price I am giving is the total price after all fees and taxes – some of the sites try to give you the base rate and then attach the fees at the end just before you enter your credit card.

So it seems that enterprise typically offers the lowest regular discount on a one week rental. but …

We Can Get a Cheaper Rate!

• Priceline says you can name your own price for up to a 30% savings. 30% off of $342 would put you at $239.40. Pretty good deal if you can get it. (priceline does work for sure, I’ve named my own deal on several hotels and gotten better-than-local rates.)
• Hotwire gave me a price of $222.72. So this is the best I’ve found so far. Of course, you can’t choose your rental company and there are no cancellations allowed. Probably the same with Priceline. Oh, and I got slightly different prices every time I checked. Prices went up and down $10 in the space of 5 minutes or so.

What About Rental Car Coupon Codes?

I scoured the web for coupon codes. Most of them did not work or the site said “we’re sorry, we have no more cars for that discount code”. A few of them, when I input them, returned the same price as the regular rate!

Thrifty and Dollar’s coupon codes both did return a deal rate on their rental cars that was lower than their regular rate when I input a coupon code, but it still was not as low as Hotwire’s price.

Here’s my write-up on car rental coupons – see the last two paragraphs for an interesting idea with huge possible savings.

Wholesaler Discounts on Rental Cars

Here’s one company that offers wholesaler rates: Discount Hawaii Car Rentals and for the most part they seem quite good. Close to as low or maybe a bit lower sometimes than Hotwire’s.

So that’s it, I choose Hotwire as the winner with Priceline as a close second and working coupon codes in third place if you want to rent a car in Hawaii with the cheapest available price.