Planning a Holiday or Summer Trip Out of San Antonio

There are two stretches of the year when everybody in this city wants a vehicle in the same week. One is summer, when leave lines up with school being out and half of San Antonio is going somewhere. The other runs from late November through the new year, when the traffic is inbound — family arriving, people flying home, households briefly doubling in size.

They are different problems. Summer is about the vehicle. The holidays are about the timing.

Summer: size the vehicle to the trip, not to the household

The most common summer mistake is booking the car you drive rather than the car the trip needs. A vehicle that is perfect for a commute across Bexar County is a different proposition with four people, a week of luggage and a cooler in it.

Two questions settle it, and they are worth answering honestly rather than optimistically:

• How many people, for how many hours at a stretch? Seats are not the constraint on a long drive — space between the seats is.
• What is going in the back, and does it need to be out of sight? Luggage for a week is a different volume from luggage for a weekend, and it changes the class more often than the passenger count does.

You reserve a class rather than a specific car, so the useful conversation is about what has to fit rather than about a model. Tell us the shape of the trip and we will narrow it down with you.

The holidays: the timing is the whole problem

Between late November and early January the constraint moves from the vehicle to the calendar, and it does so in a way that is easy to miss when you are booking in October.

We are open Monday to Friday 7:00 AM to 5:30 PM and Saturday 8:00 AM to 1:00 PM. Read that against a holiday week and the collisions show up immediately: a Sunday arrival, a Saturday afternoon return, a flight that lands after we have closed. None of those is a problem, and all of them are a problem if nobody mentions them until the day.

• An after-hours drop-off is available on request — ask for it when you book, not the night before.
• The SAT hand-over and an on-base round trip both need 24 hours' notice, which is a different thing from a booking cutoff.
• If somebody else is collecting the vehicle, they go on the agreement in advance, with their own licence checked the same way yours is.

Renting for somebody who is visiting you

This comes up constantly in December and it has one hard edge. The card has to be in the name the booking is under, so you cannot book a vehicle in your name and pay for it on behalf of a visiting relative who will be the one driving.

What you can do is have them book it, or have them named as a driver on your booking — both work, both are straightforward, and both are much easier arranged a week out than at a kerb on the twenty-third.

If the plan changes, which at this time of year it does

Most changes cost nothing at all — dates, class, where it is collected, who else is driving. Ring us as soon as you know; changes run on what is actually free at the time, and moving the dates or the class can move the price, so we requote it with you first.

A cancellation is the one that runs on a clock, and the windows are set out in full on the requirements page rather than summarised differently here.

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