What To Do If You Lock Your Keys In Your Rental Car

by SharonKurheg

If you lock your keys in your personal car when you’re near home, you may come out relatively unscathed. Hopefully, someone else is either in or can get into your house, grab your spare set of keys (you have and know where your spare set of car keys are, right?) and bring them to you.

When you’re out of town and driving a rental car, it’s another story.

Here are some options if it ever happens to you…

See if the state’s free roadside assistance can help

Some states offer free roadside assistance. Can’t hurt to ask, right?

Call the rental car company’s roadside assistance number

When you rent your car, you usually should get the option of various upsells. One of them is usually insurance for roadside assistance. If you opt-in (it only costs a few dollars per day), you can call and they’ll help you unlock your car so you can get the key. They can also help you with a dead battery, flat tire, etc.

There are some downsides to this option. With rare exceptions, there’s no guarantee of how long it will take for the roadside assistance to get there. They may also charge extra for problems the driver caused such as running out of gas or (hello!) locking your keys in your car. But it’s still an option.

Use your own membership

If you have roadside assistance from membership with AAA, AARP, Urgently, Verizon, etc., now could be the perfect time to use it.

Check your credit card

Several credit cars out there offer roadside assistance, either as a perk of being a cardholder or with a nominal fee per incident. Check your benefits.

Pay-for-use

HONK roadside assistance is a program similar to AAA’s, AARP’s, etc., except with no membership. You contact them via their app if you have a problem. Prices start at $49 per visit and go higher, depending on what kind of problem you’re having.

*** Feature Photo (cropped): U.S. Air Force by Airman 1st Class Nathan Lipscomb

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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary

5 comments

Jon April 23, 2020 - 3:53 pm

I believe you can unlock your car from the Avis app.

Reply
SharonKurheg April 23, 2020 - 4:56 pm

Really? Wasn’t aware of that. I wonder if you have to have data access, though? Otherwise if you’re in the middle of nowhere with no data, or are from outside the U.S. and rely on WiFi….?

Reply
derek February 20, 2022 - 11:23 am

I locked the keys in the rental car by accident when returning the Thrifty rental car. The return agent broke into the car using a plastic wedge, rubber bladder and wire hanger in about 3 minutes. Shocking.

Reply
Mike Saint February 20, 2022 - 12:43 pm

Which credit cards offer roadside assistance these days? I thought they all got rid of it. Any of them still offering it?

Reply
SharonKurheg February 20, 2022 - 12:50 pm

Lots do. We’re going to add that to our list of future posts. 😉

Reply

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