RentalCars.com Scraper

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.

Search many destinations in one run: pass a list of pickup locations and the actor runs one search per location against the same JSON API the site itself uses, with prices in the destination's currency or one you choose.

Results are billed per item, so set maxResults to the number of offers you actually want — see 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, then runs the search through the same JSON API the site itself uses.

RentalCars.com puts that search API behind an AWS WAF challenge, so the search goes through Bright Data's Web Unlocker, which clears it. The unlocker succeeds on about one attempt in three and each attempt takes 40-100 seconds, so budget 1-3 minutes per search and give a batch run a generous timeout.

Batch runs

Pass up to 100 pickup locations in one run via pickupLocations, 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 not repeated.

Each location gets an equal share of the run's remaining time, so one destination that the unlocker struggles with cannot spend the whole run. About 20 locations fit in the default 1-hour timeout. Locations the run did not reach are named in the run status message, and everything already scraped is kept.

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). Results are billed per item, so this is also your per-search cost cap.
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 for the location lookup. RentalCars blocks datacenter IPs, so keep this on residential. The search itself goes through Bright Data Web Unlocker, not this proxy.
brightDataApiKey	String	No	Advanced. Your own Bright Data API key for the Web Unlocker zone. Leave empty to use the key configured on the actor.

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

Two charges apply, both handled by the Apify platform:

• Actor start, charged per GB of run memory.
• Result scraped, charged for every item in the dataset.

So a search returning 500 offers costs 500 result events, and a search returning 20 costs 20. maxResults caps how many offers a search returns, which makes it your per-search cost cap.

A search that returns nothing is not billed for results. A run's usage cost only settles after the run has SUCCEEDED, so the figure shown while it is still running is not the final one.

Cost estimate

A search is one location lookup (about 1.5 seconds) plus one search through Bright Data's unlocker, which takes 40-100 seconds per attempt and needs about three attempts on average. Budget 1-3 minutes per location, and raise the run timeout above the default hour for batches over about 20 locations.

Proxy requirements

RentalCars.com blocks datacenter IPs, so the location lookup runs over residential proxies — that is what the actor defaults to. The search API sits behind an AWS WAF challenge that a proxy alone cannot pass; it goes through Bright Data Web Unlocker instead, using the key configured on the actor unless you supply your own.

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
• The AWS WAF challenge on the search API clears on roughly one attempt in three, so an individual search can fail even though the actor is working; rerunning it usually succeeds
• 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.