I wanted to share a recent experience I had where I booked a car rental, but ended up deciding not to actually rent the car. In the end, I ended up saving about 50% off of my transportation costs by eschewing a rental car. While I don’t think that my strategy is anything super groundbreaking, and I’m certain that it won’t work in every situation, I thought I’d share just as a reminder that there are alternatives to renting a car.

The backdrop – 4 days in Utah

My wife and I recently returned from a short trip out to Utah. My son is working as a church camp counselor this summer and it was his off week. Since he was off work, that unfortunately also meant that he had nowhere to stay. So we decided it would be fun to go out there, rent a hotel and stay with him for a few days. If we didn’t have a ton of miles and points, we might have chosen a different option, but this seemed to work for us and plus it would be a nice way to hang out with our son for awhile.

Booking a rental car

We were a bit late in deciding to take this trip, so it was only about a month before the actual trip that we decided for sure to go. I used Autoslash to book my rental car, and they gave me a price of $254 for the 3 full days that we would be there.

(SEE ALSO: Autoslash saves the day again (to the tune of $483.98) )

I then put my reservation back into Autoslash, hoping that it would bring the price down, but it never did. I guess demand was high, or perhaps something else was going on.

Canceling my car rental

A few days before we left for our trip, I was running the numbers and thought that it probably didn’t make sense for us to book a rental car, since we didn’t have a ton of driving that we were planning on doing. I figured that it might cost $50 or $60 to take an Uber from the Salt Lake airport down to where we were staying in American Fork (about 30-40 minutes south). So if we did that twice, then took a few shorter rides around town, it was pretty much a no-brainer that we would save money by not renting the car

Did I save money?

So how did it turn out? Here were our expenses from the trip:

• Uber from the airport to our hotel – $59.95
• Lyft to a dinner appointment – $10.07
• Lyft back to the airport – $43.20
• Plus maybe another $10 or $15 in food delivery fees that we would have avoided if we had rented a car.

We also had my son’s girlfriend who picked us up a few times, and we walked to one of our lunches. So total cost was ~$125, compared to the rental car of $254 plus another $20 or so in gas that we would have had to spend. So yes, I say we saved about 50% compared to the cost of renting a car.

The Bottom Line – Don’t bother renting a car

Of course this isn’t going to work in every situation, but I thought it served as an interesting reminder that even in the (very car-centric) US, renting a car isn’t always needed. We could have saved even more if we had wanted to take the Frontrunner public transportation from the airport, but we didn’t feel the need to cut costs that much.

One thing that I found interesting was that mentally, it was “easier” to potentially pay $254 to rent a car to have an “all you can drive” experience, as opposed to choosing to pay money to take a rideshare each time we wanted to go somewhere. I was trying to be intentional about telling myself it was “okay” to spend money on a rideshare since we had already budgeted the money (we were willing to pay to rent the car!) but mentally / emotionally it was difficult. I’m not sure if maybe that’s just a “me” thing or not.

Have you ever had a situation where you were going to rent a car then didn’t? Leave your story in the comments below

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