OK, this is a *very* interesting nuance of rental car pricing. The key factor here is the time of the rental. Not the duration of the rental but the time itself. Let me illustrate with Alamo.com, and then we can talk about AutoSlash.

Let's take your rental parameters and use 7014667/AU2852SDA since that nets you the best deal. Plugging all of this info into Alamo.com does come up with the price of $20.24 as you stated.

Now let's put the exact same info in, but change the pickup and dropoff times to 5:00PM instead of 5:30PM. Important note that the rental is still a 24-hour period, it's just offset by 30 minutes. One would think that it would yield the same rate, but then again that would be a logical assumption. Logic sometimes has nothing to do with rental car pricing! The actual rate for this rental is $26.19! Why does moving the time 30 minutes change the price by $6? Who knows, but it does.

If you repeat the same exercise using 4:00PM as the pickup and dropoff times, and then try substituting 4:30PM instead, you will receive the same results. So, the there is some strange on-the-hour penalty going on with Alamo's pricing (or a half-hour discount depending on the way you look at it).

This is not new to us. It's actually something that we're working on building into our pricing engine down the road. Basically the idea is that small variations in time can something yield savings. We can automatically test varying the time by up to an hour in either direction and see if it makes a difference in the rate. Admittedly, we have higher priorities in the short term, but it's an interesting angle that can be leveraged.

OK now let's get back to AutoSlash. AutoSlash can in fact achieve the lowest rate of $20.24 for this rental. The nuance is that our time picker only goes in hour increments. This is easily solved though by selecting 5:00PM for your time, and then clicking into the time field and editing it to say 5:30PM. Then when you click search, you'll see the $20.24 price in the grid.

As for the issue of only showing you confirmed into a compact, this is just a limitation of the Sabre interface we go through. There is a protocol that Sabre uses to talk to the rental companies in-house reservation systems. This interface can do all the basics, but it's not robust enough to be able to sense things like an upgrade coupon changing the car class automatically. Even though it shows a compact, the coupon is successfully applied, and you will receive the upgrade. You can actually confirm this by taking your Alamo reservation number from your AutoSlash confirmation and plugging it into Alamo.com to view your reservation there.

Hope this helps to clarify things. I *very much* appreciate your posting the details of your rental and the price discrepancy. We're still optimizing things, so stuff like this is useful to us. It reminds me that we definitely need to focus on timing issues in the future to get our customers the best deal possible.