Rental Cars Scraper

Compare car rental prices from 900+ suppliers including Hertz, Avis, Europcar, Enterprise, Budget, Sixt, and more. Scrape real-time availability, prices, and vehicle details from RentalCars.com -- the world's largest car rental comparison platform with 60,000+ locations.

Why use this actor?

Travel agencies, price comparison tools, and market researchers need car rental pricing data across multiple suppliers without manually checking each one. This actor automates the search on RentalCars.com and extracts all available offers with prices, vehicle specs, and supplier ratings in a single run. Perfect for building price alerts, comparing rates across dates, or feeding travel booking aggregators.

Input

Field	Type	Required	Description
pickupLocation	String	Yes	City, airport, or location name (e.g., "Brussels Airport", "Paris CDG")
pickupDate	String	No	Pick-up date in YYYY-MM-DD format (default: 7 days from now)
dropoffDate	String	No	Drop-off date in YYYY-MM-DD format (default: 14 days from now)
pickupTime	String	No	Pick-up time in HH:MM format (default: "10:00")
dropoffTime	String	No	Drop-off time in HH:MM format (default: "10:00")
driverAge	Integer	No	Driver age, affects pricing (default: 30)
maxResults	Integer	No	Maximum results to return (default: 50, max: 500)
proxyConfiguration	Object	No	Proxy settings (residential proxies recommended)

Output

Each result contains:

Field	Type	Example
supplier	String	"Hertz"
carName	String	"Volkswagen Golf"
carType	String	"Compact"
transmission	String	"Automatic"
seats	Number	5
doors	Number	4
bags	Number	2
priceTotal	Number	342.50
pricePerDay	Number	48.93
currency	String	"EUR"
pickupLocation	String	"Brussels Airport"
dropoffLocation	String	"Brussels Airport"
pickupDate	String	"2026-04-10"
dropoffDate	String	"2026-04-17"
fuelPolicy	String	"Full to full"
mileagePolicy	String	"Unlimited"
rating	Number	8.2
reviewCount	Number	1542
imageUrl	String	Car image URL
url	String	Direct link to the offer
scrapedAt	String	"2026-04-03T14:30:00.000Z"

Example output

{
    "supplier": "Europcar",
    "carName": "Renault Clio",
    "carType": "Economy",
    "transmission": "Manual",
    "seats": 5,
    "doors": 4,
    "bags": 2,
    "priceTotal": 215.80,
    "pricePerDay": 30.83,
    "currency": "EUR",
    "pickupLocation": "Brussels Airport",
    "dropoffLocation": "Brussels Airport",
    "pickupDate": "2026-04-10",
    "dropoffDate": "2026-04-17",
    "fuelPolicy": "Full to full",
    "mileagePolicy": "Unlimited",
    "rating": 7.8,
    "reviewCount": 2341,
    "imageUrl": "https://cdn.rcstatic.com/images/car_images/web/renault/clio_lrg.jpg",
    "url": "https://www.rentalcars.com/...",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-04-03T14:30:00.000Z"
}

Use cases

• Price monitoring -- Track car rental prices over time for specific routes
• Travel aggregators -- Feed rental car data into booking platforms
• Market research -- Compare supplier pricing strategies across locations
• Price alerts -- Get notified when rental prices drop below a threshold
• Academic research -- Study pricing dynamics in the car rental industry

Cost estimate

This actor uses Playwright (headless browser) and approximately 0.5-1.0 compute units per search. At standard Apify pricing, that's roughly $0.25-0.50 per search depending on the number of results and proxy usage.

Tips for best results

• Use residential proxies -- RentalCars.com has AWS WAF anti-bot protection. Residential proxies significantly improve success rates.
• Search dates in the future -- Use dates at least 3-7 days in the future for the best availability.
• Airport locations work best -- Airport codes (e.g., "Brussels Airport BRU") tend to have the most consistent autocomplete results.

Limitations

• Requires JavaScript rendering (Playwright-based) -- uses more compute units than simple HTTP scrapers
• AWS WAF may occasionally block requests -- residential proxies recommended
• Maximum ~500 results per search (platform limitation)
• Drop-off location is same as pick-up (one-way rentals not yet supported)
• Data is scraped from the public website and may change without notice