We’re going on a “California Road Trip” but we didn’t have a car. Since we aren’t actually driving from San Francisco to San Diego, we realized we didn’t need a car for the San Francisco portion of the trip. Using Lyft and public transportation would be perfect and help us avoid the $60/night parking fees that are prevalent in the city. In San Francisco having a car would be more trouble than it was worth.

San Diego

In our San Diego segment, we thought about getting a car but realized our hotel is in downtown and close to some of what we wanted to see. Other places we’d be visiting in the city (like Old Town) have limited and expensive parking as well. We figure we’ll just use a Lyft (or Lyft XL since there will be five of us) in San Diego as well. Parking at the hotel we’re staying at is $50/night. Coupled with the cost of the rental we feel comfortable that using Lyft will not be more expensive and will likely be much cheaper and more convenient as we won’t have to pay for parking at the destinations.

Lyft Pink

Since we will be using a lot of Lyft, I decided to look into the new Lyft Pink loyalty program. This program is $19.95 a month and the main perk is that you get 15% off your rides. During the trip, we’ll spend more than enough on Lyft to save the $20 fee so that was like a no-brainer.  We had to spend money to save money but it would be pretty easy to make that work for this trip.  I’d just cancel it when we got back.

Palm Springs and LA

For the final part of the trip, we were definitely going to need a car. The thinking was to pick up the car on our last morning in San Diego and drop it off at LAX before we fly home. This means it’s a one-way rental which often is often more difficult to find a deal on that ones that are returned to the same destination.

For example, my favorite car rental company by far is Silvercar. You rent an Audi A4 (or other models) for a reasonable price and get all the bells and whistles included. Plus you get to drive an Audi! They unfortunately only do round trip rentals so we couldn’t use them for this trip.

I looked at several other options out of the San Diego airport and prices were close to $1000 for the week-long rental of a mid-size SUV. I spent a considerable amount of time over the summer trying to find a more reasonable price with no luck. I finally tried AutoSlash, which is an awesome website I’ve mentioned before that can often find great deals for you.  They can even track existing reservations and notify you if they see a lower rate.

This time when I use the site I searched based on the hotel’s address, not the airport. This allowed the search to find rentals from local franchises, not just the on-airport ones. Some franchises don’t allow point to point rentals, but it searched ones that did and found a rate that was just over $400. That’s less than half of what I was looking at with airport rental locations. I even had a few rental locations to choose from and I picked one based on distance and the time of day it opened.  I checked Google Street View to verify it wasn’t too shady of a location, too.

Since we were traveling from San Diego to Palm Springs on the first day it was important to pick the car up first thing in the morning so the place I picked opened up at 8:00 am on Saturdays, the first day of our rental. The thinking is that we’ll get up early at our hotel, eat breakfast, check out, take a Lyft to the rental place and head north to Palm Springs from there.

I was able to secure a RAV4 or similar with a cancelable rate. While it will be somewhat tight with the 5 of us, the drive is only a couple hours and it will be big enough to hold our luggage.

I kept tabs on the rental price and checked back during Black Friday and Cyber Monday and the prices weren’t any lower than what I had already booked. We’ll have this car with us in Palm Spring as well as Long Beach for our final 5 days. LA is a huge place and it would cost way too much to use Lyft for that part of the trip, even figuring in the parking costs at the hotel.