Originally Posted by
heraclitus
I Autoslashed recently for the first time in a couple months and I was a little baffled by the fact that all I got were a bunch of priceline links.
It's not really obvious to me how Autoslash is any different now vs. just starting out in priceline myself? I click on a rate and it just takes me to priceline's 1001 different options where I presumably have to search for the rate myself. Why bother?
Here's why. Here's the most recent search our system did for someone, on a request submitted 10 minutes ago (I picked the most recent one our system had processed, just so that it was completely random, not to cherry-pick any particularly good result):
Search: Pick-up 11/1/17 @ 10pm at TUS, drop-off 11/4/17 @ 6:30am at TUS, economy car
Priceline's rates:
Dollar: $135 (for economy)
Alamo: $141
Enterprise: $159
Hertz: $171
Budget: $176
Avis: $197 (for economy)
National: $221
Our rates:
Alamo: $113
Dollar: $116 (for compact)
Hertz: $118
Enterprise: $143
Budget: $153
Avis: $173 (for compact)
National: $189
By going straight to Priceline, you're seeing and booking the undiscounted, retail, rack rate. By having us do the search for you, we're finding and applying coupon and discount codes that are knocking 20-30% off or so. We see typical results ranging anywhere from 10% up to more than 70% off in some cases--it's just a matter of how the rental companies have loaded the coupons in their systems.
(Plus, notice on two of those results, we actually found coupons that made an upgraded car cheaper than the smaller-sized car. Every now and then we even find that something like a premium or luxury car ends up cheaper than a midsize, due to various promotional codes. You won't find that just searching retail rates on Priceline/Expedia/Orbitz/the rental company sites.)
Originally Posted by
cblaisd
My understanding is that you have to go to
www.autoslash.com/track and put in the details from the Priceline reservation in order to have the reservation tracked for price drops. And then when it happens, rinse and repeat.
This is a common question we get both here on FT and by email, and if anyone has any suggestions for how we can better communicate this, we're all ears.
I find the Priceline links to be pretty obvious in terms of what class car I'm looking for; almost always at the top of the list.
The whole reservation/tracking process is MUCH more cumbersome than it used to be and I dearly hope Autoslash can find a less workload-on-the-user source for bookings and will once again automatically re-book price drops.
That said, I will continue to go through the cumbersome process of reserving with Priceline (and put up with their subsequent spammy emails), putting details in Autoslash/track, getting a price drop, re-reserve, cancel old one, re-track. Why? They have continued to save me major dollars, although I will admit that the auto rental companies have made it much more difficult to use Autoslash -- which is regrettable.
We agree it's cumbersome and have come up with some ideas for ways to make it easier. There are a lot of under-the-hood and back-end changes we really need to make first to be able to do a good job supporting it (user profiles are one major thing, so you can manage everything from a control panel rather than email links), but hopefully it isn't too far in the future.