RentalCars.com Scraper with Pay Per Search Pricing

Scrape and compare car rental prices from RentalCars.com, the world's largest car rental comparison platform (owned by Booking.com). Extract offers from Hertz, Avis, Europcar, Sixt, Enterprise, Budget, and dozens more suppliers in one run. No login or cookies required.

You pay per search, not per car. One search costs $0.01 and returns every offer for that destination and date range — up to 500 cars. Scrapers priced per result make high-volume price monitoring expensive fast: a single airport search returning 300 cars costs $2.40 at a typical $0.008-per-item price. Here that same search costs one cent.

Why pay per search?

If you monitor rental prices across many destinations and dates, your cost scales with the number of searches you run, not with how many cars each search happens to return. The math at typical volumes:

Your usage	Searches/month	Cost/month
One city, weekly check	4	$0.04
10 destinations, weekly	40	$0.40
50 destinations, 5 date pairs, refreshed 10x	2,500	$25.00

Users on higher Apify plans pay less per search (volume discounts are built into the event pricing).

How it works

1. Enter a pickup location (city, airport, or station), for example Barcelona Airport — or a list of them for batch runs
2. Optionally set pickup and drop-off dates (defaults: 30 days from now, 7-day rental)
3. Optionally set the driver age and a per-search result limit
4. Start the actor

The actor resolves each location through the RentalCars location search, runs the search through the same JSON API the site itself uses, and returns structured offers in seconds per search. No browser automation, no form filling.

Batch runs

Pass up to 100 pickup locations in one run via pickupLocations — one billed search per location, all with the same date pair. For a grid of destinations × dates, run one batch per date pair (schedules or API calls make this trivial). Batch runs are restart-safe: if the platform migrates the run mid-batch, completed searches are never re-executed or re-billed.

Input

Field	Type	Required	Description
pickupLocation	String	No	City, airport, or station for a single search. Default: Barcelona Airport
pickupLocations	Array	No	Batch mode: a list of locations, one billed search each (max 100 per run). Overrides pickupLocation.
pickupDate	String	No	YYYY-MM-DD. Defaults to 30 days from now. Past dates are replaced by that default.
dropoffDate	String	No	YYYY-MM-DD. Defaults to a 7-day rental.
driverAge	Integer	No	Driver age, affects pricing (default: 30)
maxResults	Integer	No	Maximum number of offers to return per search (default: 500, max: 500). The search costs the same either way, so leave it high.
currency	String	No	ISO 4217 code (EUR, GBP, USD, CHF, PLN, ...) to price results in. Leave empty to auto-detect from the destination's country.
countryOfResidence	String	No	Advanced. ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code sent as the location-search locale (default gb). Does not affect pricing currency — use currency for that.
searchUrl	String	No	Advanced: a RentalCars search-results URL. The location name and dates are extracted from it.
proxyConfiguration	Object	No	Proxy settings. Residential proxies strongly recommended due to AWS WAF protection.

Currency handling

By default, results are priced in the destination's local currency: a Spanish or German airport returns EUR, a UK airport returns GBP, a US airport returns USD, and so on. This is derived automatically from the resolved pickup location's country — you don't need to set anything.

Set the currency input to force a specific currency regardless of destination — useful if you're quoting a customer in their home currency (e.g. price a Spanish rental in USD for a US-based client). RentalCars' search API accepts an explicit currency parameter independent of pickup/drop-off location; if you pass an unsupported code it falls back to EUR.

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
totalPrice	Number	287.50
dailyPrice	Number	41.07
currency	String	"EUR"
fuelPolicy	String	"Full to Full"
mileagePolicy	String	"Unlimited"
rating	Number	8.2
reviewCount	Number	1543
imageUrl	String	Car image URL
url	String	Search results URL
scrapedAt	String	"2026-04-07T14:30:00.000Z"

Example output

{
    "supplier": "Europcar",
    "carName": "Volkswagen Golf",
    "carType": "Compact",
    "transmission": "Manual",
    "seats": 5,
    "doors": 4,
    "bags": 2,
    "totalPrice": 287.50,
    "dailyPrice": 41.07,
    "currency": "EUR",
    "fuelPolicy": "Full to Full",
    "mileagePolicy": "Unlimited",
    "rating": 7.8,
    "reviewCount": 2341,
    "imageUrl": "https://cdn.rcstatic.com/images/car_images/web/europcar/golf_lrg.jpg",
    "url": "https://www.rentalcars.com/search-results?...",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-04-07T14:30:00.000Z"
}

Use cases

• Price comparison — Compare rental prices across all suppliers for a given location and date range
• Price monitoring — Schedule daily runs to track pricing trends and find the cheapest booking window
• Travel agencies — Aggregate rental car data across destinations for client recommendations
• Market research — Analyze supplier pricing strategies, availability patterns, and seasonal trends
• Fleet analysis — Track which car models are available at specific airports and cities

Integrations

This actor can be combined with Apify's built-in integrations to:

• Schedule runs to monitor prices daily or weekly
• Export to Google Sheets for easy analysis and sharing
• Send webhook notifications when prices drop below a threshold
• Connect to Zapier/Make for custom automation workflows
• Use the API to integrate car rental data into your applications

Pricing

You are charged $0.01 per executed search (the search-executed event). A search that fails — bad location, blocked request — is never charged. There is no per-result charge and no charge for starting the actor: a search returning 500 cars costs exactly the same cent as one returning 20.

If you prefer per-result billing for small one-off lookups, the same data is available in our RentalCars Scraper priced per car.

Cost estimate

Each search makes two HTTP requests (location lookup + search) and finishes in a few seconds. A 50-location batch run completes in a few minutes.

Proxy requirements

RentalCars.com uses AWS WAF anti-bot protection that blocks datacenter IPs. Residential proxies are required for reliable results — the actor defaults to Apify residential proxies.

Limitations

• All searches in one run share the same pickup/drop-off dates — run one batch per date pair for a date grid
• One-way rentals (different drop-off location) are not supported yet
• Anti-bot protection may occasionally block requests even with residential proxies
• Data is scraped from the public website and may change without notice
• Some fields may not be available for all car offers

How to scrape RentalCars.com data

1. Go to this actor's page on the Apify Store.
2. Click Try for free to open it in Apify Console.
3. Configure your search query or URL, set the maximum number of results, and adjust proxy settings if needed.
4. Click Start and wait for the run to finish.
5. Download your data in JSON, CSV, Excel, or connect it to your workflow via API.

You can also schedule regular runs, set up webhooks for real-time notifications, or integrate the results directly into your application using the Apify API.