If you’re flying into Denver, you will likely want to rent a car to drive on into the Rockies. Be careful when booking that you book for pick-up at Denver International Airport and not just Denver, which is about a $40–50 cab ride away.
The best place we found — best price — was denversuvrental.com. It may not be the best, but its prices were so good that you’re not going to do much better. The catch is that you don’t know which brand of car rental you’re going to get, but that is not important to the budget-conscious family traveler. (If it were important, you’d probably just be going straight to your brand-of-choice’s website.) After you book your car, you will receive an email from denversuvrental.com confirming, and then about an hour later, an email from the rental company with your rental information, including your confirmation number. Our car came from Budget.
One fabulous point for denversuvrental.com: After I booked, they informed me that they had found an even lower price than the already-low price they had quoted me at booking, and they passed the savings onto me.
Pro Tip: Rental companies have more SUV’s than minivans. If you can fit your family into an SUV, you’ll save quite a lot of money.
At Denver airport, as with most airports, you take a free shuttle bus from the terminal to your car rental location. Budget did try to upsell us into a larger SUV, but they let me inspect the one we had booked, and it fit us and our luggage fine, so we declined the larger car. (It wasn’t a hard upsell, but more they provided us with a larger alternative.)
Bottom line: You can save a lot of money at websites that specialize in discount car rentals. You don’t have to book your car at the same website you booked your air ticket. When flying into Denver, definitely consider denversuvrental.com.
