Crossing the border in rental car

[steamer12]

I am a Canadian citizen and was planning to rent a car via Hotwire that I planned to drive to the US and back to Canada to drop off. Before booking I checked with the car rental companies that Hotwire was submitting bids to. One of the rental companies (I believe it was Alamo) had additional charges for taking a car to the US. Enterprise would not allow their Canadian rental cars to go the US! I did not bid fearing that Enterprise would be the winning company. I called Hotwire and there was no way that they could exclude Enterprise from the bidding. I shopped around and eventually got a good deal $100 Cdn more directly from Hertz for the duration of my 11 day rental. Hertz will allow me to drive anywhere in the US with no conditions on the unlimited mileage. :)

[Karen O]

Hello All,

I thought I might just add a bit to this topic. We live in Canada, but my husband is a U.S. citizen. Since we live minutes away from Detroit, but on the Canadian side of the border, we do most of our travelling via Detroit. We recently booked a flight Detroit - Seattle with the intention of driving from Seattle to Prince George, British Columbia. I called Alamo before booking our flight to ensure we could take a car to Canada, I was (mis)informed that since my husband was American, we could bring the car over, but was advised to keep my name off the contract. Trying to tie loose ends up in regard to our jaunt, I called the Vancouver customs to confirm the car situation and was told, in no way, could we bring the car over even though my husband was American - it depends solely on your where you reside. With that said, and having already booked our flights on the information received from Alamo, (should have went right to the source), I asked if they had any suggestions. Customs told me to check with Alamo if they had any cars that were Canadian plated, this would allow us to travel in Canada. Alamo does at this time, have the proper plated cars - they noted our necessity and we were told to call a few days beforehand to confirm something is still available. Keeping our fingers crossed!

Sorry for the length of this reply, but hopefully it will shed a little light on rental cars and cross border travel!!

Happy Travels,

KO