Rental Cars Blog and Resources

“While most know Austin as the live music capital of the world first and the capital of Texas second, there is so much more to this thriving city than just music. If you have never had authentic Texan BBQ from Opies, then I don't know what you've been doing with your time! Lake Travis is just a one-hour drive from downtown and is a great place to watch the sunset. If you are a party animal, Sixth Street is the place to be.” — Kieran White, Photojournalist Reasons to get out of Austin Though Austin is known as the Live Music Capital of the World, there are many reasons for you to take a day and get outside of the city. Within just a couple hours drive there are a number of towns and cities that you won’t want to miss. The following are some of the places that A Taste of Koko, Timeout, Austintexas.com, and Texas Hill Country recommend that you visit.  Important Note: Drive times may differ depending on time of day, traffic, weather, etc.  Under an Hour Drive The Cathedral of Junk (15 minutes) It is unlikely that you have ever heard of a religious building being made from garbage. The Cathedral of Junk has been created using scrap metal. For many, it is the perfect example of the phrase “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” The Natural Gardener (24 minutes) The Natural Gardener is a garden providing visitors with a panoramic picture of beauty complete with stunning flowers, winding trails, and thick green foliage. No matter the season, you will love what this garden has to offer. Make sure that you take some time to visit the butterfly garden found here as well. Dripping Springs (36 minutes) Dripping Springs is home to the Hamilton Pool Preserve swimming hole. Here you are surrounded by a beautiful oasis with numerous trees and a variety of wildlife. Other attractions that you can enjoy in Dripping Springs include the Hills of Milk and Honey farm where you can learn about bees, livestock, and land practices; Rolling in Thyme Dough where you can try some seasonal bread, croissants, or sandwiches; or the Twisted X Brewing Company where you can taste handcrafted craft beer.  Lockhart (37 minutes) Lockhart is considered “The Barbeque Capital of Texas.” One of the best known restaurants here is The Original Black’s Barbeque which has been run by the same family since 1932. For a taste of the culture found in this town, you can stroll through the shops, galleries, restaurants, and the historic theater located near town square. Some visitors enjoy seeing the architecture of the Caldwell County Courthouse and others prefer learning more about where outlaws used to be detained at the Caldwell County Jail Museum. Wimberley (50 minutes) Wimberley is home to a number of fun day activities for you to enjoy. Jacob’s Well houses one of the longest underwater caves in the state of Texas. You can enjoy wandering through a number of art galleries including Wimberley Glassworks where you can watch artists create incredible sculptures from hot glass. To purchase some freshly pressed olive oil or small batch wine, you will want to visit Bella Vista Ranch. Gruene (51 minutes) For those interested in history, this is the perfect small town to visit. All of Gruene is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Once in the town, you will be surrounded by 19th-century brick storefronts and old shops. It is also home to the oldest dance hall in Texas: Gruene Hall. It still has old traditional wooden floors and offers a venue for up-coming music stars to perform. Big names have also been performing there since 1878.  New Braunfels (52 minutes) New Braunfels is known for its water coaster at Schlitterbahn Waterpark and Resort as well as its 18 different breweries on the Hill Country Craft Beer Trail. Outdoor enthusiasts enjoy rending tubes and riding the currents of the Comal and Guadalupe Rivers that pass right through the city.  1-Hour Drive Johnson City (1 hour) Johnson City was the childhood home of Lyndon B. Johnson. Today you can learn more about the 36th President of the United States by visiting the Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park. A number of hiking trails with beautiful views can be found in Pedernales Falls State Park for those that enjoy the outdoors. For an up close and personal experience with over 700 animals you can spend some time at the Exotic Resort Zoo. This city has something to keep everyone entertained.  San Antonio (1 hour 21 minutes) Have you ever visited a Colonial Mission? If not, San Antonio is a great place to check out. This city is rich with history and provides visitors a number of destinations. A favorite for many travelers is to take a walk along the river walk. If you have an afternoon free, you can enjoy visiting some of the many art museums or take the kids to Six Flags Fiesta Texas, SeaWorld, or the San Antonio Zoo.  Fredericksburg (1 hour 32 minutes) This quaint small town is famous for its German heritage and wineries, which each use unique recipes. For an enjoyable afternoon you can visit the National Museum of the Pacific War,  Enchanted Rock State Natural Area, or the beautiful flower gardens at Wildseed Farms followed by a yummy meal at one of the local German restaurants. If you have never had German food, then you are in for a treat.  Waco (1 hour 36 minutes) Home to the world-famous Magnolia Market, Waco is a popular destination for many. The Magnolia Market was started by HGTV Fixer Upper stars Chip and Joanna Gaines. Other attractions that you may enjoy in Waco include the Dr. Pepper Museum, Waco Mammoth National Monument, The Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum, and the Cameron Park Zoo.  2-Hour Drive Houston (2 hours 37 minutes) Most people have heard of Houston, but why should you visit this city? To start, it is a very diverse city and sports 19 museums, galleries, and cultural museums. You also might enjoy one of the more than 300 parks that are scattered throughout the city. Some of the most popular include Memorial Park, Mercer Arboretum, and Botanic Gardens. For those with an interest in outer space, the Space Center Houston is a must. Here people of all ages enjoy learning about space exploration.  3-Hour Drive Dallas (3 hours) If you have heard of Texas, you have likely heard of Dallas. It is home to one of the largest metropolitan areas in the United States. There are so many things to do and see here so you will want to make sure and do your research in advance. Some popular places for shopping and food are Uptown, the Deep Ellum, the Bishop Arts District, and the Lower Greenville neighborhoods. If you are interested in history, you might enjoy the Sixth Floor Museum and the Dealey Plaza where you can learn more about John F. Kennedy’s assassination. If you decide to visit Dallas, you will be surrounded by things to do all day. Corpus Christi (3 hours 10 minutes) Did you know that large expanses of beautiful sandy beaches exist on the coast of Texas? Corpus Christi is one of these areas. This coastal city located right off the coast of the Gulf of Mexico is a great place to escape to take a break from the city and enjoy the fresh ocean breezes. You can spend your day enjoying the sun, water, and sand, or take some time to explore the city. Situated on North Beach, you will find the Texas State Aquarium and the USS Lexington (one of the carriers during World War II). There are also a couple of State Parks and gardens that you may enjoy visiting. Galveston (3 hours 35 minutes) Galveston is the perfect destination for a weekend getaway. It is located on the coast with beaches and the well-known Pleasure Pier which features a number of rides, midway games, dining, and shops. Many people enjoy seeing the numerous examples of Victorian architecture found here. The perfect stop for the entire family is Moody Gardens. Here you will enjoy an aquarium, a rainforest pyramid, a 4D theater, a number of live animal experiences, and a fun ropes course.  4+ Hour Drive Krause Springs (4 hours) Car rental services in Austin Think you are going to need a rental car during your trip? Here is a list of the car rental services that are available in the city:  Alamo Rent A Car Limos of Austin Avalon Transportation Service Fox Rent A Car Enterprise Rent-A-Car E-Z Rent-A-Car Budget Car Rental Priceless Car Rental Advantage Car Rental Austin Van Rentals Thrifty Car Rental Hertz Car Rental Go Rentals Avis Car Rental Payless Car Rental Read recent customer reviews to ensure that you are getting the best service.  Attractions in Austin Texas is known for “big” things. Austin is a big city and has a number of fun things to do while you vacation. We wanted to help you brainstorm for your trip and have compiled a list of popular attractions in the city with help from U.S. News and A Taste of Koko.  Iconic Attractions State Capitol SoCo District Sixth Street LBJ Presidential Library Austin Bats Esther’s Follies Thinkery Driskill Hotel Shopping on South Congress Museums and Memorials Blanton Museum of Art Bullock Texas State History Museum Mexic-Arte Museum Parks and Gardens Mount Bonnell Zilker Metropolitan Park Ann and Roy Butler Hike-and-Bike Trail at Lady Bird Lake Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center Austin Nature and Science Center Mayfield Park and Preserve McKinney Falls State Park Barton Springs Pool Umlauf Sculpture Garden Hamilton Pool Lake Travis Culture and the Arts Austin City Limits Live at The Moody Theater The Contemporary Austin — Laguna Gloria University of Texas at Austin Alamo Drafthouse Two-Step Dancing at Broken Spoke How to get around Austin There are a number of ways to get around Austin if you do not have a car. Kerri Sholly, Director of Public Relations and Communications at Four Seasons Hotel Austin offers some suggestions to help you get to where you would like to be quickly and efficiently.  Walking — Walking is best if you are going to be downtown or around South Congress. Pedicabs — If you are going to be traveling a medium distance in the city, this is a great option to save your feet. SUPs — If you are interested in going across the lake, you will want to hop on a SUP. Swan Boats — Not only is this a great way to see the lake, but it also provides you with some exercise. Willie Nelson’s Vintage Tour Bus — This is a great way to get out and tour the Hill Country wineries without having to worry about drinking and driving. Boat — A number of boats are available for you to hop on to go out and see the numerous lakes in the city. Bicycle — If you would like to travel around the lake, you can enjoy cruising on the bike trails that have been created in the city as well as the mountain biking trails in the greenbelts. Motorcycle — If you would like to go to cruise through the countryside to see the beautiful wildflowers, a motorcycle is the way to go.  Parking in Austin Austin is a big city and it provides a lot of parking options to ensure that everyone can find a place. That being said, much of the parking is not free. Parkopedia is a great resource to help you locate available parking on a map. Not only can you see what parking is available (along with its specific pricing), but you can reserve a spot to make sure that it is still there by the time you arrive.  Many resources to help you find the best parking in the city are available online. If you are planning to visit the bats on the bridge, 6th street downtown, the State Capitol, or the Austin Convention Center, you may want to check out this parking guide provided by Pauly Presley Realty. It will help you to find the perfect parking places located close to each of your destinations. 

If you're in the market for a car, you've likely considered two avenues: buying new or buying used. And if you've hunted for former rental cars, you've probably wondered how used the purportedly like-new vehicles will be. Is it really the compromise between new and used that you've been looking for? Rental cars are available to consumers through rental agencies, dealerships, and auctions when rental agencies expand their fleets with new models and sell off their old stock. You may inadvertently test drive one at your local car dealer, or you can go directly to rental agencies such as Enterprise, Hertz, and Budget to purchase the cars they’re phasing out. The pros and cons of buying a rental The models they sell are fairly new and well-maintained, and the no-haggle pricing at rental car agencies is attractive for those seeking less hassle, but these pre-owned vehicles also have their drawbacks.“Be wary of the dings, scratches, and stains that a rental car is more likely to have,” Ian Cogswell of Superior Honda warns. “Rental cars change hands very frequently, and renters are generally less careful than owners.” Buyers might lose heart when they realize many rental cars have racked up mileage and wear and tear from their journeys. Customers drive to get their money’s worth out of rental vehicles during their rental period.However, rental agencies combat this by charging customers for damages, thoroughly inspecting a rental vehicle after it’s returned. This might deter some renters from indulging in irresponsibility.Read also: How to Protect Yourself from Common Rental Car PitfallsBut whatever the condition of the car’s exterior, rental agencies dutifully maintain the vehicle with the help of certified mechanics. Cogswell notes, “Rental car companies perform excellent maintenance on these cars — they have to take care of their assets, right?”And if you want a car with a detailed vehicle history, buying a rental might be a good option. “They keep detailed maintenance and usage records that you can trace back,” Cogswell explains. “If you see something you don’t particularly like in the car’s history you can move onto the next one.”Rental agencies might also give you a chance the rent out the used car for test driving. If you went to a dealership, you might have thirty minutes or so to take a car out for a spin. A rental car company might give you a few days, plenty of time to take it to a mechanic to conduct a pre-purchase inspection and drive the car for yourself to see how it handles. A data-driven warning So maybe you’re convinced these pros outweigh the cons. Noah Messing, co-founder of Cloovy, has a word of caution. Cloovy searches Manheim’s auction site and purchases vehicles on behalf of their clients, and they’ve analyzed their findings to present some results on rental car damages: “Our data suggest that the myth that rental cars get abused more than other cars has some truth to it,” Messing explains. “We crunched numbers for roughly 16,500 car and truck sales this spring. We tested whether rental cars are more physically beat up than other cars after the same number of miles on the road. Physical condition isn’t a perfect proxy for mechanical condition, but they’re closely related, especially over big sample sizes.“Here’s what we found. For cars with 10,000 to 20,000 miles, rental cars had an average condition score of 4.49 (out of 5) versus 4.49 — an identical score — for all other cars. In other words, there was no difference in physical condition. “For cars with 20,000 to 30,000 miles, rental cars were in slightly better shape than other cars after the same mileage, scoring an average of 4.44 versus 4.42 for all other cars. But these numbers hide a key fact which confirms the conventional wisdom that rental cars get beat up more: the rental cars in this group were, on average, 1.31 years younger than the other cars, meaning that they had fewer days of the sun and rain wearing out the vehicle.“Thus, if you’re buying a rental car, you should try to get a pretty good discount — approximately the amount that a non-rental car would cost that was one year older.”If you thought the price tag on a 2017 rental car was a good deal, you might need to reevaluate: it should be priced as if it were a pre-owned, non-rental 2016 vehicle to be competitive.And even if a rental received those frequent service check-ups at an agency, the rental car company might be selling it because major maintenance was on the horizon. Messing says, “We try to steer customers to off-lease vehicles, mainly because the car’s primary user isn’t acting on, in essence, insider information about when to trade in or sell the car. With an end-of-lease vehicle, the turn-in date is predetermined; with rental cars and typical trade-ins, there’s a heightened risk that some major repair is looming, causing the owner to sell.” This is why a pre-purchase inspection is critical.So, what do you do with this information? Remember that buying a pre-owned vehicle always involves some risk, but also remember that buying new comes with a hefty price tag, high monthly payments, and faster depreciation. The best thing you can do is conduct thorough research. Read reviews, contact experts, and never be rushed into a decision. Renting a car can come with a barrage of hidden fees; you don’t want a similar barrage when you’re buying one! Read also: Top Rental Car Tips: 20 to Make Your Next Rental the Best Ever

Self-driving vehicles are an inevitability for our future. But before consumers can hit the road in one of their own, they might find themselves in someone else’s on their way to the airport. Ridesharing and rental services have some of the biggest benefits from this innovation, primarily paying less for personnel. And autonomous cars may need to be regulated by temporary ride-offering services, because privately-owned cars could oversaturate roads. Who will be the first to tap into this revolutionary self-driving technology — rental car agencies or ridesharing services?The answer may seem obvious from an initial glance. Ridesharing companies put a significant dent in the rental car industries’ market share with their transparent fees, mobile accessibility, and valet service. In numerous statistical reports and thinkpieces, Uber and Lyft are praised as meteors killing the rental-car dinosaurs that consolidated to drive up prices and remove competition. With ridesharing already being an innovative idea that has skyrocketed to success, and with Waymo announcing a (rather limited) self-driving rideshare service, it looks like rental car companies will be lucky if they can keep up. However, that’s exactly what they intend to do.But how can they compare to the ridesharing companies helping autonomous vehicles hit U.S. roads? Uber and Lyft have raced to incorporate self-driving cars into their fleets. Lyft partnered with Aptiv and Waymo to provide autonomous rides in Las Vegas and Phoenix; Uber sunk over a billion dollars in self-driving technology while placing its bets on its own staff to refine self-driving cars. Then Tesla jumped into the fray with lofty promises of robotaxis filling the streets of America by 2020. But all these promises are failing to live up to their expectations. Some services require human chaperones for the “autonomous” ride; others have proven major safety risks and boast technological incompetence compared to human drivers. For now, ridesharing companies are stalling, trying to pave a way forward when legislation and public opinion often force them to yield.In the meantime, what have rental car companies been doing? Playing bingo and giving grandchildren hard candy? Not so. This evolution has changed how some rental companies view ridesharing. Behind Waymo’s ridesharing app, a fleet of Phoenix-based personnel is cleaning and fine-tuning the autonomous vehicles between rides — that would be the employees of rental car company Avis. Waymo delivers the car to your door, but Avis keeps the car running and clean and provides the car a lot to stay in while it’s idle. Hertz has followed suit by partnering with Aptiv in Las Vegas to manage its self-driving fleet, and Enterprise is partnering with Voyage to service its own autonomous cars. The self-driving revolution should be pitting ridesharing and rental companies as competitors, but it has instead created a symbiotic relationship that might allow both to thrive. In the future, the two may fuse entirely.But for now, this is a clever move for rental car companies, who foresaw all the struggles of getting ahead by developing their own self-driving technology. “I think we are still a couple of years away from having advanced self-driving vehicles that rental car companies could use without risking a devastating lawsuit,” explains Tony Arevalo, car insurance agent for Carsurance. “While you are using the services of a ridesharing company, such as Uber, your driver and their insurance are liable for injuries you can suffer. If you used a rented self-driving car, the rental car company and the vehicle's manufacturer would be responsible for anything bad that happens to you.” Rental car companies can’t take that gamble until autonomous vehicles are rigorously tested and vetted as reliable transportation — which is years to come.Rather than blowing millions or billions of dollars on brittle artificial intelligence and fighting policymakers on accident liability and safety regulations, rental car companies have offered to babysit, biding their time and seeing how the battle plays out. Uber and Lyft have a lot to lose if their self-driving cars don’t perform; Hertz, Enterprise, and Avis simply have a few tentative partnerships that could sputter out and die. Is this move too slow? This is a typical complaint of most rental car companies' choices, and possibly their choice will not be enough. But it is safe, and slow and steady wins the race.Also read: Top Rental Car Tips: 20 to Make Your Next Rental the Best Ever