![]() This year Daily Getaways is already underway. As for any sale not all "sale-items are created equal and the same is true for the Daily Getaways. Below is the run down of deals which I think are good deals for each week and my brief take on which one are worth chasing. As with any deal, do your own analysis before you jump on to purchase the deal. Week 0 (April 10 to April 14): April 10 - Alamo Car Rental Certificate (Good Deal): You get $50 Alamo Car Rental certificate for $25. Although it is 50% off the face value, in reality the certificate works like a coupon and thus would reduce the taxes as well. On top of it you could combine 3 certificates together to get a good discount for rentals of longer period. The only downside is the certificate does not work at all Car Rental locations (including some airports). April 12 - Priority Club IHG Points at ~0.589 to 0.6 cent/point (OK Deal): You can buy the IHG prioirity club points from ~0.589 to ~0.6 cent/point with this deal. Since you can always buy IHG points for 0.7 cent/point whenever you need as described in the linked article even without the daily getaway, this deal is only good if you have immediate use of it. Do note the IHG points now expire after 12 months if there is no activity on the account. Week 1 (April 17 to April 21): April 19 - Universal Studios Hollywood front of the line pass for $139 (OK Deal): This deal boasts of saving $61 off of 1 day admission pass which also gives you front of the line access. In reality this is "Non-peak" pass and you need to give 30 days of notice to book this. Alternatively if you have American Express card which keeps having Amex Sync offers at Undercover Tourist, you can do equally better rather than investing up-front in daily getaway deal. Week 2 (April 24 to April 28): April 25 - Avis One Day Car Rental for $30 (Good Deal?): This deal lies somewhere between OK and Good Deal. This is simply because the certificate expires in 1 year (May 15, 2018) and has restrictions of black out days while not exactly spelling out what all are the black out dates. The good part is you can rent up to "G class" of car and you can combine up to 7 certificates for up to 7 day of rental. It is a good deal only if you know you will be able to use it. April 28 - Choice Privilege points at 0.4 to 0.45 cent/point (Great Deal): This one is a great deal and you can bet it will be sold out in few minutes. Choice privileges sells points at a cost of 1.1 cent/point without any promotion. So getting more than 50% off the purchase price of points is great deal given that you can potentially use the points at a great redemption value in Europe. As I had pointed out in my article last year there have been positive changes around Choice privilege points expiration policy etc and this represents a really good deal if you travel to Europe and use your points for hotel redemption's even in the peak season. There are 4 different packages available with price ranging from 0.4 cent/point to 0.45 cent/point and they are limited. So get them before they sell out.
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![]() Most often than not on your trip you rent a car and its good to know what all the available options are as well as which websites would fetch you the cheapest car rental cost. To start with there are two kind of rentals you could book:
Opaque Booking: When you book the car rental using this kind of service you are typically renting through 3rd party travel agency site. Below are the advantages and disadvantages of this kind of rental: Advantages:
Transparent Booking: This is how typically you would book you car rental using either 3rd party OTA websites or the car rental agency website. The only disadvantage if you might end up paying a higher price then otherwise you would pay using the "Opaque booking", but the advantages are many as listed below: Advantages:
With that being said for "transparent booking", below are some of the websites which you would find useful for finding promotion / discount codes before you would go ahead and make your car rental reservation or could help you in getting the best available price for your next car rental. Promo Codes / Discount Codes Websites:
Car Rental Booking Websites (OTA): Below is the list of websites which generally tend to give good discounted rates for car rentals. Some of them are limited to access for "members only", but if you have access to them it would be really useful. You would want to try at-least 3 of them before concluding the best available price.
Note: None of the above links are referral links or earns me any commission. Thanks for reading! ![]() Daily Getaways are brought by American Express in partnership with various Hotels, Car Rentals, Amusement parks and City Pass vendors. There are various points purchase and pass purchase deals which are discounted from 20% to 50% of their actual purchase value. On top of this discount if you make your purchase using American Express Credit Card you get 10% additional discount on the purchase price. The details of the deals are revealed one to two week at a time in advance. This year the Getaways will start on June 10th and the first 2 weeks are already up which you can preview here. My focus of this post is on the car rental deals in Week1 and Week2 which would be a good bargain depending on where you use them. Week1 : Alamo Car Rental Certificate of $50 value for $25 The Alamo Car Rental deal on June 11th is good one for your if you typically rent for 2-3 days on average. Since the value can only be applied to BASE Rate and not the entire car rental cost and cannot be combined with any other discounts including the "Alamo Insider" discount, the best bet would be to use them at places where none of the other available discounts work or are not worth. Of course if Alamo is not your preferred car rental company this deal is NOT FOR YOU. One of the best uses of the Alamo Car Rental Certificate is in Alaska and Hawaii where most other discount codes does not work and sometimes does not give significant discounts. Below I have listed some of the "Pros" and "Cons" w.r.t. maximizing the value of this deal. Pros:
Cons:
Week2: Avis One day Car Rental for $33 The Avis One day Car Rental on June 21st is good deal if you regularly rent premium cars from Avis. ( of course their service is good and they have good cars on rental). Generally premium cars are sold a good price and so getting such cars at fixed BASE price of $33 is good value in my opinion. Of course the terms of the deal reduces the shiny deal it could be as it is capacity controlled and any location can refuse to allow it to be used on a specific day. You need to pay additional fees, taxes, including additional service such as GPS, car seat etc, which you purchase separately. Also you can use the certificate in Canada, Puerto Rico and US Virgin Islands. Below are the important "Pros" and "Cons" in my view. Pros:
Cons:
I personally like Alamo Car Rental deal better than Avis as you can rent the car you like and have lesser restrictions in terms of usage of certificates and black out dates. So what's your take on it? And yes, do not forget to get 10% additional discount by using your AMEX Credit Card. On your air trip one of the concern is the cost of car rental. As the cost of the flight tickets are dynamic so goes the car rental prices. But if you are leisure traveler looking for bargain on you car rental then you might be interested in the strategy below which can sometimes result in good amount of savings on your wallet. Step1: Start your car rental search at Expedia, Priceline or CostcoTravel: Begin your search for car rental prices at the Expedia, Priceline or CostcoTravel . Most often than not you will get fairly decent idea on going price of car rental. Another advantage of going this route is you get the prices which are not "discounted" through any rental car company or partner discount/promotions. For e.g. sample search for SJC Airport for car rental from 04/13/2013 to 04/15/2013 yields a lowest price of Economy car (incl of taxes) as $38.31 (Payless), $38 (Payless) and $37.82 (Alamo) as shown below Step2: Go through the website "Zalyn" to see what are the coupon options it presents: You do not need to sign up for the service and your intent is to get listing of different possible coupons. Zalyn does a good job of listing good set of discount coupons and codes as shown below. Step3: Use Step1, Step2 and Car rental vendor's website to figure out the pricing for your rental: This step involves using data of approximate price for your rental from Step1 combined with different discount codes provided by Zalyn in Step2 to determine what further discounts you could get. Since we know that Payless and Alamo were the lowest, it would be best to try different codes provided for Payless and Alamo above. Selecting "Payless - Save 15% on your rental" gives a code which discount's Payless cost to $34.47 (all inclusive) for Economy Car as shown below. Step4: Is this the best? Check one more thing!!
One area where "Zalyn" lacks is in the ability to determine if you can earn any "Airline Miles" and thus assigning a discount code and coupon to earn those miles. Since rental from "Payless" does not earn any "Airline Miles" but "Alamo" does earn them you might want to check if there are any special promotion code at "frequenflyerbonuses" which gives you a good discount as well earn "Airline Miles"? (Note: Earning Airline miles adds a cost of $.75/day to $1.5/day and earns from 50 miles/day [UA, Delta] to 600 miles/rental [Southwest] or 1000 miles/rental [Virgin Atlantic] , so you might want to take that into account in your car rental). Best of luck for your NEXT CAR RENTAL search!! |
AuthorI love traveling / backpacking. This blog focuses on below 3 aspects of travel: This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
December 2020
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