Duplicate reservations, or avoiding the Town Car
 

Does anyone have experience with having duplicate reservations - same location, same (or close) date/time, different car class?

I am thinking about doing this as a way to avoid getting a Town Car when I reserve Group H. If a TC is at my space with no unassigned DTSes on the lot, use another reservation for a Group E. I refuse to pay Group H prices for a Town Car, a much inferior product to the DTS.

The Group E reservation should theoretically be upgraded to Group G as an Avis First member. Of course, Group G seems to be infested with Crown Vics and Grand Marquis rather than the Lucernes and 300s I prefer. :rolleyes:

Since both of these would be preferred reservations, I am wondering if the computer would catch this, as an airline's would, or if one of the credit card authorizations would be denied.

Yeah, but it seems from above that you also do not prefer to pay for it, right? I have nothing against Avis when they are trying to save the best Premium cars for those of us that reserve them, and give lower Premium cars to the upgraders.

If you reserve Group E and get a Marquis, you can always go the the prefered counter and say that you want a Ford Taurus instead.

Exactly. It must be early morning cobwebs, but this whole two reservations thing seems too complicated... why not just go back and downgrade yourself?

The duplicate reservation game works best when you have two people traveling together and can make the two reservations in two different names. Otherwise the system tends to hiccup.

I have had this happen several times where I booked online and called the CHM desk to change the reservation. The system is about 50/50 on catching this, then the site is about 50/50 on catching the duplicate. 25% of the time I have two cars waiting on me. The other 75% it is caught and fixed well before I get there. Gretchen, the manager in San Antonio was the first one to catch it at the site and let me know about it. We chatted about how this could happen while waiting for the DTS to be pulled up to the terminal and she said that it is uncommon for the system to let this through.