How To Use VPN To Save Money on Car Rental

Renting a car online has become very common these days. However, do you know that when booking a car online, some car rental companies will offer different prices to users in different countries in order to maximize revenue?

Car Rental: Different Countries, Different Prices

Most customers usually only search for prices in the country in which they live, so they can be easily exploited. For example, people in countries where owning a car is a luxury may want to pay a higher price for car rental than those who consider a car a basic necessity.

For example, for premium SUVs, the UK quoted from one of the popular car rental services is around $250. Other European counterparts such as France, Spain and Germany offers very similar prices. However, if you book the same car from the US, the price might jump to over $11,000. If you book the same rental car from many other countries (mainly Asia), the price might jump further to about $1,400.

Car Rental: How Does Dynamic Pricing Work?

Dynamic pricing means that a company changes the price of a service based on the data collected from consumers. Services such as car rental are able to change the quoted price depending on from where in the world their website is accessed along with other variables collected by cookies. Car rental services will want to be able to analyze as much data as possible about their customers and adjust prices accordingly.

From your IP address, the car rental operator on the website you are visiting can identify your location. If it is determined that you are requesting an address from Italy, you will see certain prices and additional services, but it may look quite different from requests from other countries such as the U.S.

How To Use VPN to Get Cheaper Car Rental Prices?

Fortunately, by finding the best prices online, we can quickly switch between different locations to make it easier to outwit rental companies.

How to switch countries when booking car rental online? The answer is to use a VPN.

VPN is a tool mainly to increase a user’s online security. However, VPN also offers many different benefits. For example, VPNs can help defeat online censorship. For example, if you travel to China, you will find many popular websites, such as Google and Facebook, are blocked. To unblock those sites, you can use one of the best VPNs for China (in Chinese, VPN 中国), to unblock those websites.

In addition, you can also use a VPN to hide your real IP address and replace it with a new one from the country of your choice (depending on the VPN server options you choose). For example, many VPN providers, such as ExpressVPN, offer VPN servers located in many different countries, such as VPN in Japan, in Hong Kong and many more. When you use a VPN, you can freely change to different VPN server locations. As a result, the website you are visiting will think you are visiting from different countries. That way, when you visit the car rental website, you can switch between different server locations, compare rates across countries and choose the cheapest option.

When using a VPN to get cheaper car rental prices, you might want to use the incognito (or private) mode of your web browser and clear the cache and cookies first. Then you can connect to your VPN, select a server location and then visit the car rental company’s website. To try a different country, you can close and then reopen your web browser, using its incognito/private mode and clear its cache and cookie again and then connect to a different VPN server location before visiting its website.

Conclusion

Many car rental companies use dynamic pricing methods to offer different car rental prices to customers from different countries. You can use a VPN to pretend you are visiting their websites from different countries in order to find the best car rental prices.