Avis - Question about Skymiles Bonus + 25% discount

I'll be renting a car for 4 days on an upcoming trip to Vegas in September and wanted to take advantage of the 5,000 Skymiles bonus plus 25% discount on rentals of 4 days or more (up to Dec 31st) that Delta shows on their website.

I'm confused about how much I'll pay for the rental. On the reservation (and also on the page where you reserve the car) it says "Coupon discounts are not included in the estimated total and are calculated at the rental counter". I understood that to mean that the 25% discount had not been applied to the estimated total shown on my reservation. But when I called Avis to confirm that, they said that the 25% discount had already been applied and I would be paying the amount shown under estimated total. I asked to speak to a supervisor who also confirmed it.

The Skymiles bonus rate (after 25% discount if what I was told is correct) is $252 for a four day rental. Their regular rate is $278. Budget & Enterprise are $220 without any discounts. I'd like to get the Skymiles bonus, but I'm not paying Avis' higher prices to get it. Any ideas on how I can get a lower rate but still get the miles?

I dunno... but for 5000 @ $32 is a pretty cheap rate to get miles... Its less than one cent per mile... Most people would jump on that band wagon.

I've been using the 5000 Skymiles coupon for a while -- definitely worth it. Just call and add coupon code MUAA133

The coupon doesn't give the discount; it's the AWD they mention on the same promo page that does the discount. The coupon is only for the bonus miles portion, so it doesn't matter that it won't be applied until later.

Meanwhile, the discount is not from what you'll get when you use Avis.com and have it search for "lowest rate", it's from some mythical higher rate (that I'm not sure who pays). That's why it never works out to exactly 15% or 25% or 50% or whatever the promo claims. (However, I find that it does tend to work slightly better than the BA AWD would have; that's what's the default AWD in my Preferred account.)

If you don't use their AWD but use another one, your discount will have nothing to do with the promotiion at all (but rather with whatever AWD you used). I don't offhand see any language in the promo requiring you to use their AWD (while BA has had such language in their "how to earn BA miles with Avis" pages for years), but I have (just to be safe) used their AWD each time I've used their bonus miles coupon, so I can't tell you from my experience whether another AWD would still give you the 5k bonus.

By the way, the biggest discount I've found comes not from which offer I used, but which week I booked. I have a week-long rental for LAS in early September, and it was coming up well over $300 ai for an economy car (with everything declined) many weeks ago when I first booked it, and then I happened to try it again and it had fallen to well below $300 ai. (I see the same thing at Orbitz; a month or more ago, Orbitz was showing Avis much more expensive that week compared to everyone else at LAS, and now they show them competitve.) I was able to change my existing reservation without actually changing anything and it did pick up the new rate. So it's worth the effort to keep checking periodically (especially if you notice they're higher than the competition -- without an obvious availability reason -- when you first book).

I've also had Avis give me time-of-return adiditional discounts in the past (not linked to any coupon, not even sure why they gave them to me!), especially when my rate was unusally high (for the market) to begin with, but I can't count on that to happen every time.

are you guys talking about the 5k Delta miles? I think it's expired now. Correct me if I'm wrong. I need to book a 3 days rental at SJC. Any suggestion?

are you guys talking about the 5k Delta miles? I think it's expired now. Correct me if I'm wrong. I need to book a 3 days rental at SJC. Any suggestion?

http://www.avis.com/car-rental/content/display.ac?contentId=delta-offer2009-US_en-013547&MID=avis.com_deltaoffer2009

Rental must begin by December 31, 2009