I haven’t spent much time optimizing car rentals and rewards because they haven’t seemed that interesting. But now Hertz and United are doing triple points so it is good to understand. In the old world, 75 United points weren’t super interesting (at 1.8 cents/point). But the latest promotion is 1,250 points per rental plus 50 points/day (1.8 cents = $20 or so). They also charge you for airline points, so this is realy worthwhile if you’ve got lots of status on United, but with their partnership it’s way more lucrative. Note also that this is for each rental no matter how long. Lots of incentive for us short renters with United and Hertz:
- 1,250 miles – MileagePlus Global Services, Premier 1K and Premier Platinum members; Hertz President’s Club
- 1,000 miles – MileagePlus Premier Gold and Premier Silver members; Hertz’s Five Star
- 750 miles – Primary cardmembers of MileagePlus credit cards from Chase
- 500 miles – MileagePlus general members.
There is also a special CDP 62455 that you can try. This is in addition to the paltry 50 points/day for less than four days and 500 points for five days or more.
However Hertz Rewards is also doing triple points as well, so this is per dollar spent. So at 675 per weekday points or 550 for a whole weekend for say a weekend rental, you need to calculate what that actually costs. It is worth way less in easy cities vs hard cities (NYC a rental like that costs $140 per day, so you are doing really well and can get lots of cents). Some folks at Flyertalk say it is about 1.6 cents per mile, but I don’t know how they calculate that at
Right now though with triple points on United, it sure does seem like an easy value to understand since airfare is way more useful for most of us than car rental points.
