 AutoSlash is a meta search site for searching car rental deals without hunting around for discount codes for various car rental companies. Although my first go to site for car rental search is "CarRentalSavers.com" it might be worth requesting a quote from AutoSlash. The way AutoSlash works is different from OTA's such as Priceline or Expedia. You have two options with AutoSlash:
 Select the Option you are looking for. Getting a quote is always a good way to fine a rate without any commitment to purchase. Once you enter the airport details, it asks if you have membership with any of the various credit card, frequent flyer programs or AAA, AARP. This enables AutoSlash to use discount codes which are provided by those membership's and get the best quote possible. Once it finds the best rate it will email the quote which has multiple rates and usually ask to book ASAP as the rates might change anytime. The good aspect of this rates is that most of the time you can cancel this rates till last minute without any penalty. Sometimes it will redirect you to Priceline to book this special rate while other times it provides the rate bookable on AutoSlash itself. Below is an example rate from "CarRentalSavers.com" for 1 day car rental in Austin and how it compares to the search with "Autoslash".  CarRentalSavers.com search for 1 day rental in AUS (Austin) Airport  AutoSlash quote for the same 1 day rental at AUS (Austin) Airport As you can see from above the "AutoSlash" still saved couple of dollars for the best/cheapest rate against the same search with "CarRentalSavers.com". The saving's in this case may not be huge but I have seen instance's where AutoSlash provides discount of 30% against the best available rate on any other car rental site.
Do note that AutoSlash may not always provide the best rate so its always useful to search couple of OTA or meta search sites before you make your car rental booking. Also before you make your final car rental booking it is always good to check any frequent flyer bonus promotions for car rental. My go to site for this is "frequentflyerbonuses.com". So, next time your rent a car do check with AutoSlash!! Disclaimer: Some of the links used in the post may be referral links and earn referral to this site. We appreciate you supporting the website.
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 TURO is peer-to-peer car rental service platform. We have written about TURO in the past here. Since then TURO has been growing and has few updates which would be useful for renting.
As of now if you are looking for renting during this holiday season you can stack below:
 Amex Offer for $45 credit for $150+ spend with TURO  More December Promo from TURO So, if you are looking to rent a vehicle for this holiday season do keep TURO in your options for car rentals.
Disclaimer: Some of the links used in the post may be referral links and earn referral to this site. We appreciate you supporting the website. Amazon has tied up with AVIS to provide 10% cashback in Amazon gift card and up to 30% in discount for AVIS rental when you link your Amazon account to your AVIS profile. The way the this works is by populating Amazon specific AWD in the "Enter a Discount Code" field for AWD. But AVIS provides fields for 3 different codes.
 Discount Promotion from AVIS & Amazon  AVIS Discount Code fields As you can see from above by default when your AVIS account is linked with Amazon it populates the "AWD" field with "Amazon Benefits". You can still use a "coupon code" and "rate code" with any available valid codes.
Interestingly most of the Airlines bonus promotion for "frequent flier" miles/points uses the "coupon code" field. For example, Southwest Airlines usually provides up to 2400 points which includes bonus miles and uses coupon code "MUAA042" which can still be added in the "Coupon Code" field and will earn up to 2400 Southwest points based on the length of your rental. Also you can start from a cashback portal meta site and select your often use/highest earning cashback portal for earning cashback on the rental on top of Amazon gift card and Airline frequent flier miles/points. As always before you pin down on AVIS do check for the best rental rates by using a meta search site such as "CAR RENTAL SAVERS" which might give you better rates. So, next time you are narrowing down the car rental choice to AVIS do remember Amazon gift card benefit!! Disclaimer: Some of the links used in the post may be referral links and earn referral to this site. We appreciate you supporting the website.  TURO is a platform to provide peer to peer car rental service. It is a car rental platform similar to Airbnb for house rentals. The cars are listed by local folks through the platform and can be either brought to the local airport (sometimes for a fee) or picked up at a local address in the city. Below is the gist of the process. You can look up here for more details:
 TURO Car Rental Search for PDX Since TURO is peer to peer car rental, it is recommended to purchase the insurance directly from TURO (Liberty Mutual is the underwriter) as damages will not be covered by the credit cards which usually provides CDW (Collision Damage Waiver) coverage. Alternatively if you rent from commercial hosts they would provide their own insurance and the additional payment for that would be directly assessed by the hosts. You can decline the insurance coverage but if you chose to take it there are 3 different kind of insurance coverage provided by TURO as shown below. The protection price calculation is shown in the article here.  Different protection plan provided by TURO The total rental cost presented by TURO consists of car rental charge along with various fees. The breakdown of the major total cost consists of below:
TURO is available in the United States, Canada, Germany and U.K. at this time. The car's available through TURO vary but you can get a pretty good deal at a lower price than what the Car Rental companies would charge otherwise. So, next time you are looking for Car Rental do remember to check out TURO. Referral - At this time TURO does offer a referral program where you get $25 in credit for referring someone to TURO. Here is our referral link (Thanks if you decide to use it). Disclaimer: Some of the links used in the post may be referral links and earn referral to this site. We appreciate you supporting the website.  Over the recent times technological innovation and community sharing has spurred lot of companies looking to provide same service as traditional companies. One area is "Car Rental".services. The traditional model of car rental is to rent from the old car rental companies or their counterparts such as Hertz, Avis and Alamo, but there are new start-ups which are trying to give established players run for their money by using the concept of community sharing. Couple of companies in this space I want to bring your attention to are: RelayRides and GetAround both use the community sharing concept. Below are few details which will help you determine if they are better options for you than the traditional car rental companies. RelayRides: RelayRides allows you to specify the destination (could be an airport) and will show available cars and pricing options for your need. The great thing about RelayRides is since it is based on community sharing you can rent a SUV or Premium Car at reasonable cost compared to the traditional car-rental companies. For e.g. Renting an SUV from San Jose Airport (SJC) from 08/01 to 08/03 gives quite a reasonable rate of $44/day (excluding taxes/fees and insurance) as shown below.  RelayRide Rental for SUV from San Jose Airport The best part is you could customize the search based on various factors such as Price, Mileage limit, Vehicle Type, Features etc, which is contrary to Traditional car-rental companies where you selection is just limited to "Vehicle Type and Price". There is no joining or annual fees as well as there are options of what kind of insurance you want and based on your comfort you could take either a "basic package" or a "premium package". The only "con" I can think of is that you need to be "approved" by RelayRides before you can rent-a-car from them. What it means is that you need to be registered with Driving License and Credit Card Details and they verify your Driving Record before you can take your rental. But given the price advantage and selection based on your situation it could be a great buy-in. The other side of RelayRides is that you can get "free airport parking" (which is currently available only at San Francisco Airport) by listing your car for rental through RelayRides (Of-course you would not earn anything from that rental). An alternative option to consider if you are not going to just park your car at the airport.This also helps them provide rentals directly from airport. If you wish to know which airports have rentals available you can look that up here. GetAround: GetAround is another "community sharing" car rental service which functions similar to RelayRides. The basic premises are same as RelayRides such as "no joining or annual fees" as well as approval needed before you take your first rental. The difference is that full-coverage as well as 24/7 roadside assistance is included in the price quote. The con is that number of selection criteria is rather limited. Taking the same example as RelayRides for Renting an SUV from San Jose Airport (SJC) from 08/01 to 08/03 gives a rate ranging from $100 to $140 (including insurance) as shown below:  GetAround Rental for SUV from San Jose Airport As you can see from above the options are limited compared to RelayRides but the pricing seems to be at par once you consider that insurance cost is included for GetAround. Similar to RelayRides you could list your idle car for rental and earn an extra income from GetAround.
Both RelayRides and GetAround has sign-up or referral promo's all the time from which you can get $10 to $25 for your first rental. So, next time you plan to rent-a-car, you would want to consider these new "community sharing" car companies for your need!  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! 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 
1. Expedia Pricing
2. Priceline pricing
3. Costco Pricing
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. 
4. Zalyn showing different discount coupon and codes!
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. 
5. Payless website with 15% off coupon
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: Archives
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