Beware of Expedia’s Different Rental Car Pricing On Website vs App

I was looking for a rental car for a November trip on Expedia. I priced out the following itinerary for  $384 CAD on Expedia’s Canadian website:

All seemed well here, but I usually book my Expedia reservations via the app because you get double Expedia Rewards points on all app bookings. So I opened my app, started a new rental car search with the same parameters, and I got the following:

Note in both cases I turned off the ability to use my Expedia Rewards points. As you can see, the original price of $529 CAD for the economy car with Dollar was discounted to $384 CAD on Expedia’s website. While on the app, it was showing $415 CAD after discount. That is a difference of $31 CAD!

Needless to say, a $31 CAD price premium did not justify booking via the app in order to take advantage of double rewards points.

I quickly booked via the website for $381 CAD, and the booking went through no problem.

My Two Cents

This was most likely a one-off, and I did not see pricing discrepancies when I did some quick follow-up by searching for other locations and dates. However, this incident convinced me from now on I should check pricing on both Expedia’s app and its website as you never know if one is cheaper than the other!

Kevin