Why Use a Truck Rental Service?

When you are moving to a new home, you generally have three options: using truck rental services, hiring a full-service moving company, or using your own vehicle to transport items. When you use your own vehicle, you may use a lot of gas transporting one load after another and the process is practically impossible for long-distance moves. On top of that, many people cannot move their furniture because they do not own or have access to a van or pickup truck. Full service-rentals are a convenient and the least stress causing option, but the price can often be astronomical. By using truck rental services, you can pay for only the services you need while getting the job done as efficiently as possible.

Truck Rental Services: What to Look For?

There are a surprisingly low number of competitors in the truck rental services industry. For this reason, your options may be limited by certain factors such as your location, your service needs or whether or not you have a vehicle of your own. When you have more than one option though, there are a number of things you need to consider when selecting the right truck rental services for your needs. For our purposes, we chose to look at the company’s territory, services, additional equipment, price and customer service. The following are the different rating criteria we chose and what we looked at under each category.

a. Territory

All truck rental services allow you to make local moves, but many do not offer one-way moves, where you are allowed to pickup the vehicle at one location and drop it off at another. Aside from this, many companies have rules or geographic restrictions that limit where you can and cannot take your rented vehicle.

b. Services

While all of the companies rent out moving trucks, some also rent cargo trailers, auto-trailers, pickup trucks and vans. Additionally, some offer assistance with loading or packing and others have self-storage services available to those who need them.

c. Additional Equipment

Moving requires a lot of equipment and while it isn’t mandatory for truck rental services to offer boxes, padded blankets, tie downs and other packing supplies such as tape and bubble wrap, it is always convenient and can make your move go much faster when you know where to get these items. A dolly, on the other hand, is usually necessary, particularly for heavier items such as refrigerators and book cases.

d. Price

This is one of the most critical aspects of renting a moving truck or other product. After all, if price was not a factor, you would probably choose to opt for a full-service rental company. In order to compare the prices of these companies, we looked at the base rental cost, the fees per mile and the insurance cost for local moves. It is important to realize that these rates may vary from location to location and that the company may also charge additional fees such as taxes, fuel charges or environmental fees.

For long-distance moves, we evaluated the cost of a 3,000 mile trip between La Mesa, CA and Hinsdale, MA. This was just a control to estimate the price of the services as a 3,000 mile trip between other locations may vary in price depending on the company. For the companies that did not offer services in these locations, we estimated the cost of a 3,000 mile trip from their location. We also looked at how many days renters were allowed to use the vehicle at this rate and how many people were able to drive the vehicle, as these would both play an important role in a trip this long. Keep in mind that you will also need to pay for gas along the way and even the companies that include taxes and other fees in their estimate do not include your gas costs.

Customer Service

For customer service, we evaluated whether or not the company offered a guarantee, if they provided roadside service in the event of an emergency, moving tips on their website and if they provide pickup services for those that do not have cars. While pickup service and moving tips are nice perks, we found the company’s guarantee of their services and their roadside assistance to be the most important aspects in this area. While not everyone will be able to use the services of any given company, it is still useful to be able to compare these truck rental services.

This will give you an idea of what to expect from the particular company you are using. In some cases, you might find it is better to contact a car rental company and rent a pickup truck rather than work with the moving company in your area. In other cases, you might find it is worth your while to drive a little out of your way to rent from higher-ranked truck rental services than one closer to your starting point. After considering all of the above factors, the leading competitors in the industry were Budget Truck Rentals, Penske and U-Haul in that order.