Car rental challenge

[PirateFrank]

Hey everyone,

So Im a bit frustrated at my car options for my trip in august and I was hoping to throw this out there and see if anyone has any solutions/suggestions.

Our plans are as follows:
Friday aug 14, fly into LAX and stay in north hollywood/universal city area until Monday
Monday aug 17, drive down to DLR and stay in anaheim until Friday
Friday aug 21, drive down to San Diego and stay in SD until Monday
monday aug 24, take a red eye home from San Diego International

Without getting into too much detail, it seems that whenever I try to book a car rental out of LAX where I dont return the car back to LAX, the cost of the rental skyrockets unreasonably by as much as 200-300%. As an example, Alamo will rent me a mid-size suv for 650 or so if I return it to LAX, but if I rent in LAX and return to SAN, the price shoots up to 1300 or greater. Out of curiosity, I reversed the rental, picking up at SAN and dropping off at LAX - no increase. (Granted, this isnt an option for us as plane tickets are set) I also tried renting at a location in LA (for example, renting near our first or second hotel) and dropping off at SAN and no crazy increase. This issue is the same, whether I rent from alamo, hertz, enterprise, etc

So that leaves me with three options as I see it:

1) Rent car out of LAX dropping off in SAN - sucking up the fact that Im getting raped on the price of the car.

2) Rent car out of LAX, dropping off in Anaheim on 8/17 - then renting again on 8/21 in anaheim and dropping off in SAN on 8/24 - to save a little on the cost of car rental during the DLr period where I will likely not need the car.

3) rent car out of non-airport location in LA and drop off in SAN. This option forces me to find a town car service or shuttle to get my family either to the hotel, the car rental location or both. Ive had some difficulty finding recommendations here. Even so, depending on where I rent the car, this still forces me to spend 100-150 on the shuttle or cab.

Any suggestions? Id love to find a solution here that doesnt require me to waste half the arrival day squaring away a rental car - but Id also like to not spend another $600 more than I have to.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

Frank

 

[GiveMeTheMusic]

Personally option 2 sounds the best to me if the prices are right. You likely won't need a car while staying in Anaheim if your focus for those days is DLR.

Option 3 is second best. If you've found an acceptable deal off-site from LAX, see if they will arrange a pickup for free (hey, ya never know) from the airport. If not, take one of the many free shuttles to a neighboring hotel. Once there, use the Uber app to arrange a pickup (you can request an SUV if you've got a lot of people/luggage) and use that to get to the car rental location. Should be considerably cheaper than a cab or shuttle.

 

[DznyGrlSD]

We're renting a car in San Fran and returning it to Anaheim and it's like $500 for less than a week

 

[Mickey_777]

We used Firefly out of LAX but dropped off at LAX. It came out to a little over $200 for 9 days (economy car). I had a really good experience with them so check 'em out

 

[Disneykidder]

We used airportrentals.com. We flew into SFO and flew out of LAX. We had the car for 14 days and it cost $1100. We were NOT happy about paying that much for a car but it was the cheapest we could find.