The board
How CarVS works
Five steps, honestly described. No account, no app, no fleet of ours anywhere in the picture — CarVS is a comparison front-end over live rental-car quotes, and bookings always close somewhere else.
Enter a city and your dates
Type a city or airport — we resolve it to a location in the rental-car feed — then set pickup and return dates and times. That is all the input the board ever needs.
The board fills with real offers
Your browser asks our server proxy, which attaches its credentials and queries Kayak’s rental-car API on our behalf. Rows appear with the agency, car class, total price and headline policies — real quotes from real fleets, sortable like an exchange board. The key never touches your browser; only our servers hold it (full statement on About).
Read the provenance chip before trusting a number
Every board wears one honesty chip stating how fresh its numbers are. This is the provenance ladder — LIVE is a fresh feed hit; CACHED means recently fetched results re-served within a short window; ESTIMATE shows typical-range bands when live quoting is throttled; GUIDE marks static editorial figures with their own as-of dates. A cached badge never pretends to be live, and quota exhaustion never produces a dead page — the ladder degrades to estimates instead of lying.
See the chip table below for exact meanings.
Compare up to three offers side by side
Select any three rows and the compare tray lines them up — price, agency, class, fuel policy, mileage allowance, deposit terms, cancellation — so the decision is structural, not just cheapest-shown. Cross-company (“Hertz vs Enterprise”) comparisons get dedicated plates elsewhere on the site; see Questions for the short factual answers that surround them.
Exit and book on the partner site
When you choose an offer, we hand you off to the partner (principally Kayak) where the booking actually happens, at the partner’s checkout, under its policies. CarVS itself holds no inventory and runs no booking engine. If you complete a booking there, the partner may pay us a commission — at no cost to you. Read the full arrangement on Disclosure.
Reference
What each chip means
| Chip | Meaning |
|---|---|
| LIVE | Freshly fetched from the feed as you watched. The strongest claim we can make about a number. |
| CACHED · n MIN/HR AGO | Real quotes from an identical search served again within a short window (30 min typical, up to 6 h off-peak). The badge states the age. |
| TYPICAL SPREADS (NOT LIVE) | Aggregate typical ranges for your dates when live quoting is limited — clearly labeled estimates, never shown as available prices. |
| GUIDE · AS OF {date} | Static editorial figures on guide pages: fee structures, deposit bands, policy facts — dated month-precision, structural rather than priced. |
Fair use
Why searches are capped at three per session
Every live search costs real money at the data provider, billed per call. To keep the board free and alive without metering you into a paywall, the free path allows up to three searches per session. Repeat the same city, dates and filters and you’ll usually get freshly served results from cache instead of a second identical bill — which is also faster for you, since those rows are seconds old with the age stamped on the chip.
The counter is a signed cookie that holds nothing but the count — it is metering plumbing, not tracking (see Privacy). Cache-first isn’t corner-cutting: it is what lets a small, independent comparison site buy every visitor genuinely live numbers where freshness matters.
One more plain statement: CarVS keeps zero retention of personal searches. Your combinations of cities and dates are not stored against you, sold, or profiled. Shared-board links reference a query hash, not your identity.