Finding out how to rent a car in the US took me quite a lot of time. Maybe this information will be useful to someone.

A word of warning at the start - renting a car in the US if you are under 25 is complicated and expensive. That’s because rental companies will charge you a young driver fee, which can be $25 or more per day. This fee isn’t often mentioned up front, so it’s a good idea to read the terms and conditions carefully to avoid unpleasant surprises when you pick up your car. The same fee applies even if a person under 25 will just be an additional driver. In addition, an additional driver is almost always an extra charge. However, some companies, such as Alamo, allow you to add a family member as an additional driver for free.

In 2024, you basically have two options for renting a car: traditional rental companies or car-sharing apps, with Turo currently being the most popular.

The main advantage of Turo is that you can choose the specific car you rent. Each car has reviews from previous renters and cars are available at various locations in the city. With traditional rental companies, you only choose the category of car, and you don’t know exactly what car you’ll get.

If you do a quick price comparison (same location and dates), the prices on Turo look better. However, the price on the first page usually doesn’t include insurance and fees. You only get the final amount when you try to book (and you can only do that after you log in). This price is often much higher (maybe even by half) and in our case it was higher than the price of the rental companies.

With a car from Turo, there is usually only a certain number of miles included. Each additional mile driven gets pretty expensive. We weren’t quite sure how many miles we would drive beforehand (although in hindsight it wouldn’t have been a problem). Rental companies usually offer unlimited miles.

One-way rentals are a problem with Turo. It’s a standard service at rental companies for a small fee.

Insurance

Insurance is an important issue when renting a car. There are 2 types of insurance: rental car insurance and liability insurance. None of us wants to risk causing damage that we won’t be able to pay for.

In Europe, most car rentals come with a deposit, which is also the maximum amount you might need to pay for damage to the car (the insurance deductible that the rental company has). In the US, there is usually no deposit and the rental car has minimal or no insurance. Americans typically have insurance on their car that also covers the rental car. As far as I know, no Czech insurance offers this particular coverage, although some travel insurance plans do include rental car insurance, usually just as deposit insurance, with a low coverage limit. Liability insurance, which would cover damage caused by the operation of the vehicle, is excluded in all travel insurance plans.

For rental companies, I would recommend making sure you have both insurances included. These are known as CDW (collision damage waiver) and SLI (supplemental liability insurance). If you visit the Czech version of some rental companies’ websites (Hertz, Avis, Alamo), these insurances are usually automatically included. Interestingly, with Hertz it is worth booking through the Czech version of the site (with insurance automatically included) because it is cheaper than booking through the US version and adding insurance manually.

With Turo you can choose different car insurance options, and the price varies according to the deductible - the lower the deductible, the more expensive the insurance. I always recommend choosing at least some insurance. However, liability insurance with Turo only covers the state minimum (for example, in Colorado it’s $50 000 $). We found this inadequate because liability insurance for rental companies has much higher limits (of course we hope nothing happens, but if it does, we don’t want to pay it off for the rest of our lives).

What did we pick

In the beginning, I liked the concept of Turo and the prices it offered. However, with each detail I discovered, I became less sure. In the end, I decided to go with Hertz rental because for the dates we needed, the car with insurance and even one-way rental came out a little cheaper than the Turo. We chose a car from the smaller branch in town, the reviews at the airport often mentioned long waits. So I booked a car with Hertz for 15 days for $1078 $ ($71 $ per day).

I could end my description of the booking here, but… after a few weeks I decided to check the prices again, wondering how the prices had changed. To my surprise, I found that the same car category is now available for $747 $ ($49 $ per day). And since the reservation was easily cancellable, I made a new reservation at this lower price and cancelled the original reservation for $1078 $. So in the end, renting at Hertz worked out significantly cheaper than at Turo.

I didn’t change my reservation for $747 and we actually paid that price at the branch. For that amount, we got a several-month-old Chevy Malibu, and the whole rental went off without a hitch. I had to pay with a credit card when I picked up the car (that will be almost always required), but when I returned the car I was able to change the payment and pay the full amount with my Revolut card, which saved me a few percent on the exchange rate (not possible with all rental companies).

Conclusion

Overall, renting a car in the US was completely hassle-free. It’s a common service that a lot of people use, you just have to pay attention to the terms and conditions.

To be sure, I got an international driving license issued before the trip (it’s a paper with a translation of the data from the Czech driving license, which they issue at the office for 50 CZK). In the end, nobody in the US wanted to see it, so I’m not sure if it’s needed.