Flight Cancellation Backup Plan: One-way Rental Car
If you’re one of the thousands of American Airline passengers stranded since Tuesday because of FAA-ordered emergency safety inspections to its fleet of MD-80s, and are surfing KickingTires on your laptop to pass the time, we’re here to help you with options. We looked into how much it might cost to rent a car to get to where you need to be, instead of waiting for that mythical “next plane” to arrive.
We picked Chicago-to-Charlotte as our test case because you’re a lot less likely to be able to hop on a some other airline’s flight to a smaller city like Charlotte. It’s a doable one-day drive from Chicago, at around 12 hours and 797 miles, although it’s obviously a long day of driving. To give you an idea of what damage this can do to your credit card, we called three rental car agencies at O’Hare to see how expensive it would be for a one-way rental of a midsize car like Chevrolet Malibu or Chrysler Sebring. One-way rentals are notoriously more expensive than a return rental, and this trip isn’t looking like much of an exception.
- Enterprise: $773.74 ($175.99 per day, plus 75 cents per mile — ouch!)
- National: $567.68, no mileage charge
- Hertz: $302.75, no mileage charge
Pricing is all over the place and we gasped (audibly) at the 75 cents per mile fee from Enterprise for our almost 800-mile trip from Charlotte to Chicago.
We asked all three about if they offer any discounts or consolation pricing for stuck travelers. We were returned with an immediate “no” from one rental agency, and another seemed ready to break into laughter at the suggestion.
