We Tested Kyte — A Car Rental Service Delivered to Your Door

Nota bene: All products in this article are independently selected and vetted by InsideHook editors. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission.

It’s a tale old as time. You’re planning a roadtrip out of the city and you need a rental car. You have your departure time planned down to the minute, and all’s well until you select your vehicle on the car rental site only to find out that the agency is closed when you need it most. Between late pickup times, early dropoff times and the risk of additional (and oftentimes surprise) fees, renting a regular car can be an unnecessary hassle. Well, move over Hertz — there’s a new kid on the block making the entire process much easier: Kyte.

Three Cities, Two Airports and a Rental Car: Open Jaw Your Way to the Ultimate Summer Road Trip

To level up your road trip, bookend it with excellent big-city adventures woven together with a rental car

Kyte represents the new frontier of car rental services, which means no more lines, no more missing your pickup time and no more worrying about traffic making you late for your dropoff, leading to you incurring even more surprise charges.

It’s an app/website, which means you can do everything, from organizing the dropoff and pickup of your vehicle to the paperwork, all on your phone or laptop. How convenient! To begin, you’ll enter in where you want the car dropped off before and picked up after your trip — this could be your home, a friends place or even an airport if you happen to be flying somewhere. There is an additional $17 fee for the pickup and dropoff service, but honestly…it’s worth it. Alternatively, you could choose to collect and deposit your car at a designated Kyte lot.

Once do this and confirm which size vehicle you want, you can add on any additional coverage to your trip depending on who risk averse you are — or how good of a driver you are — enter in your payment details and confirm your booking. Easy. As. Pie. Your trip will be cancellable and refundable up to 48 hours prior to you leaving so if anything crazy happens at the last minute you have some breathing room.

We took this service for a spin ourselves and here is the skinny on how easy the process actually was. Spoiler alert, it was fantastic. First off, the booking process was in fact a breeze. The people who pick up and drop off the vehicles are called Kyte Surfers and, similar to Uber, you’ll see their ETA on the app. Our came on time with almost no delay and delivered the vehicle with a full tank.

We went upstate and came back a few days later, in the evening, which didn’t matter with Kyte. The car was picked up at around 9 p.m. by a Kyte Surfer and all was said and done. To be 100% transparent, similar to a regular rental car agency, if you do drop off the car without a full tank of gas you will be charged so that Kyte can fill it back up. But other than that, this site is unique and stands out among the oligarch of classic car rental authorities. The long and the short of it is that the experience was smooth and effortless, with zero stress involved. No frustrations like you’d normally expect with traditional car rental services—everything just works.

If you’re planning a trip anytime soon or just want to take a car out for a long-ass drive, then Kyte should be your go to. So we’ve gone ahead and linked the service down below for you to check out. There was almost no confusion on what we were getting and ended up zooming away in an SUV.