Thanksgiving Travel Car Rental Tips

Video Transcript

"MATT CAIL: Hi, I'm Matt Cail. And on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to be providing you with tips to make your travel a lot easier this holiday season. Next question and tip on the list, car rentals. Are you going to have to be renting a car for your trip home for Thanksgiving? It's an important question to ask yourself. Because if you have to, then it's something else in lumping in there with your where you're going to, when you're going, are-you-flying questions that you're going to have to deal with in advance. You don't want to show up the day of, right, when you've like basically been dropped off the plane and say, hey I need a car. Because that's when the car-rental places, they're just waiting for people like you. Where you'll be off the plane, you haven't made advanced reservations, and you'll end up paying through the nose, oftentimes, because they'll have their Thanksgiving special or just one car left. I'm not saying that all car-rental places are being disingenuous. I'm just saying not to put yourself in a situation where you have to trust them at the last minute. So do your reservations at least, I recommend, probably around, say, Thanksgiving, about 30 days in advance. You can do it longer, but you should try to have it out at least a month in advance; otherwise, you're just going to have the problems where you only have the super-premium models available for car rental that they're going to let you rent. Generally, a lot of car-rental rules, you have to be over 25 or older. Something else to keep in mind, you should research in advance, is if you have a car at home and you have car insurance, see whether or not your car-insurance provider has rental coverage. Oftentimes, your car-insurance policy will have that to where it will basically cover you if you're, say, renting a vehicle and then you don't have to worry about damage to the rental car either because the car-rental places will have plenty of insurance they're going to try to sell you. They're going to say, oh, your policy may not cover A, B, C and D. So make sure to know what your policy covers before you walk into the car-rental place."