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Checking competitor car hire rates by hand vs Rate Pulse. A worked time estimate, what each covers, and when the spreadsheet still wins.
Checking rates by hand means opening a booking site or your competitors' own websites, searching each date and writing the prices into a spreadsheet. Rate Pulse does that search for you every morning at 38 listed airports and puts the result on one free page. The trade-off: by hand you choose exactly what to check, while Rate Pulse checks a fixed set of 3-day hires on one booking site.
| Rate Pulse | Checking by hand | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Yes free | Your time, or a staff member's |
| Refreshed | Yes daily, each morning NZ time | Whenever you get to it |
| Look-ahead | 14 pick-up days | Any date you search |
| Hire length | 3-day hires only | Any length you search |
| Booking sites | rentalcars.com only, searched from NZ | Any site, including your competitors' own |
| Every brand on rentalcars.com at the airport | Yes | Partly only the ones you check |
| Customer ratings next to price | Yes with 7 sub-scores | Partly if you copy them across |
| Holidays and events in the window | Yes each with a source | No |
| Rate history | No one snapshot, replaced daily | Yes if you keep your old sheets |
| Campervans | Planned | Yes |
| Alerts or API | No | No |
Rate Pulse facts from /how-it-works/ and the airport pages. Checked 7 Nov 2026.
This is a hypothetical example. Your numbers will differ, so swap in your own.
Say you watch 5 competitors across 4 car categories, for the next 14 pick-up days. That's 5 × 4 × 14 = 280 prices per check.
On one booking site, one search per pick-up day shows every brand and category:
Total: just under 2 hours per check.
On your competitors' own websites, it's 5 sites × 14 days = 70 searches. At about 3 minutes each to pull 4 car types, that's 210 minutes, or 3.5 hours.
| Hypothetical routine | Time per check | Time per year |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly, one booking site | about 2 hours | about 104 hours |
| Every weekday, one booking site | about 2 hours | about 520 hours |
| Weekly, competitors' own sites | about 3.5 hours | about 182 hours |
Even the weekly routine is about two and a half working weeks a year. And it only covers your 5 chosen competitors.
Checking by hand suits you if your competitors don't list on rentalcars.com, you rent campervans or long hires, or you only need a quick look a few times a year.
Rate Pulse suits you if you run car hire at one of the covered airports, you want a daily read of the whole market without the admin, and 3-day rates over 14 days are a fair guide for your business.
Plenty of operators will do both. Use Rate Pulse for the daily read, then spot-check the hire lengths and channels it doesn't cover.
It depends on how many competitors, car types and dates you check. In our hypothetical example, 5 competitors, 4 car types and 14 pick-up days is 280 prices and about 2 hours a check on one booking site.
Not always. Rate Pulse only shows 3-day hires on rentalcars.com, for the next 14 days. If you need longer hires, your competitors' own websites or campervans, you still need to check those yourself.
No. The dashboards are free. You leave an email to open the full page, and the Monday update email is a separate opt-in.
Free. Open your city and leave your email to unlock the benchmark and every brand's ratings.