Ok, so I've been freaking out about how to pay for our rental car during our honeymoon. We're going to be in California for 7 days and will be going all over SoCal, so a rental is really the only option. I've been searching for several weeks now, and I was coming up with really consistent figures of around $300 for the rental.
I tried every discount site I could come up with ... my brother suggested rentalcarmomma, and I was kind of underwhelmed by what it had to offer. Tried Kayak, it came up with some really cheap rentals from Thrifty. I'm all about going cheap... but when every single review on Yelp and Trip Advisor about a particular rental location was negative and said they'd had to wait over an hour and a half for a car (if they were able to get one), I'd rather pay a little more and not have to deal with a headache to start off the trip.
Googled, and googled, and googled. Came across a site all about how to use the bidding process on Hotwire and Priceline, and some really good advice on how to get bids accepted. Finally took the plunge, put in a bid ... and it got rejected. It offered to let me rebid (usually you have to wait 24 hours) if I increased the price by $4/day (I originally bid $14). I did so, and it accepted it!! Yes!!
I've been pricing "standard" size cars and consistently come up with around $300 for the week - and going down in class didn't make enough of a difference to make it even worth looking at. The lowest I found was I think through Budget, at $289. The Priceline winning bid went to Avis. I had looked it up earlier, and for the same rental it was $316.
My winning bid came out to $161 for the week! I can't believe it!! $150 less than even discounted retail price. I want to run around yelling how awesome I am right now, lol. I spent probably 4 hours researching on Google this morning, but it's totally worth it right now!!