Good news for folks looking for Sydney Airport rentals!

East Coast Car Rentals, already amongst our top picks for independents in Brisbane, Gold Coast, and Melbourne have opened shop there and we’re pleased to find their prices for Sydney Airport hires are as competitive as ever. On top of that, they offer probably the lowest daily waiver reduction rates. Read more in our updated article on the Best Independent Companies for Sydney Airport.

Related posts:

1. Sydney Airport – Best Independent Car Hire Companies
2. Sydney Airport-City Public Transport
3. Sydney City – Best Independent Car Hire Companies

Oodles is one of our top two recommended car rental comparison sites for the Big Boys of Avis, Budget, Europcar, Hertz and Thrifty. In our Oodles review, we highlighted the site’s unique ability to plug in discount codes (or coupons) from Avis, Budget and/or Hertz when doing a search but had lamented the fact you need to seek out these discount codes in the first place.

Now, they’ve added a new section in their homepage featuring ‘today’s top ten deals’. Clicking on a coupon code will automatically enter it as part of your search criteria. You can enter one code each for Avis, Budget and Hertz to be searched in tandem. We like this as another step in the right direction to simplify, simplify, simplify. Now if only they’ll let us plug in discount codes from Europcar and Thrifty too!

Click to view Oodles website

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Anyone who has rented a car from Avis, Budget, Europcar, Hertz, or Thrifty before mid-2009 will be in for a big shock when they notice the not-so-modest jump in current car hire prices. Our original post on car hire costs to expect used to say a 1-week car hire for a full-sized sedan will cost you an average of A$290. Now, we’ve revised it to ask you to expect a cost around the A$430 mark. That’s a whopping 40-50% average price increase across Australia’s major city airports!

Why has this happened? (with thanks to Sarah for the question)
The global recession has hit the travel industry hard – just look at all the flailing airlines – and that includes car hire. The story as told by the major car rental companies is that they’ve had to slash their fleet in order to stay afloat in these bad times. As a result, with greatly reduced cars available, they’ve had to push up prices. How absolutely essential it is for them to raise prices this substantially, if at all, is open to debate.

What can we do about it?
Thankfully, most of the major price hikes have been reserved to the big global brands. If you want to stick with these known names, you will just have to fork out the money. But you may be more motivated to consider other options: Many of the smaller independent companies haven’t increased their prices (and even if they have, it’s by a lot less). We suggest you do a little extra research on alternative companies as now, more than ever, your savings will likely be sizable. A little digging can go a long way.

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VroomVroomVroom and Bargain Wheels, two of the choice car hire sites we uncovered in our research, are now one.

The potential synergy is clear with each comparing different sets of car hire companies: VroomVroomVroom grabs you the live prices from Avis, Budget, Europcar, Hertz and Thrifty, whilst Bargain Wheels delivers prices from the smaller independent car hire companies throughout Australia. VroomVroomVroom is at the top of their game in our opinion. At this point Bargain Wheels does not display results in a user-friendly fashion but they can deliver savings in particular locations (it is one of our recommended sites for Brisbane, Melbourne, Gold Coast, Perth and Adelaide).

The combined result could potentially be what every car rental seeker dreams of. So let’s hope this corporate buyout translates into advantages for us customers with VroomVroomVroom improving on Bargain Wheels’ usability and developing a search engine that will incorporate both their capabilities into one. We’ll be keeping an eye out on the two for you.

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