enigmaMN

Tough one with the 4th of July...

Pickup Location: MCI
Dropoff Location: Same
Pickup Date and Time: 7/3/13 - 9 AM
Return Date and Time: 7/7/13 - 4 PM
Vehicle Size Preference: Standard
Memberships: DL, AA, WN
Best Price you've found, Hertz or otherwise: $41 daily - $316.72 total.

leafpile

Try Alamo. Contract ID: 706768 (up to 20% off) with Coupon Code: AF4469SDU (free weekend day)
Standard: Chrysler 200 (or similar)
$80 week = $139 Total

leafpile

You can save a little bit with Alamo. Contract ID: 7014627 (Costco, but use Alamo website) with Coupon Code: AF4469SDU (free weekend day)
Compact: Nissan Versa (or similar)
$500 month = $652.53 Total

handai

Pickup Location : LGA (or manhattan)
Dropoff Location: LGA
Pickup Date and Time: May 21, 2013 9AM
Return Date and Time: May 22, 2013 10 PM
Vehicle Size Preference: compact sedan
Memberships (AAA/USAA/airline FFP/etc): Costco
Best Price you've found, Hertz or otherwise: $77 at dollar but in new jersey pick up and return. Prefer to pick up at LGA (or Manhattan) and return at LGA. Don't mind paying a bit more than $77

AutoSlash

It's a little more than $77, but if you really want to pick up at LGA, we were able to find $122 with National or $127 with Hertz.

handai

thank you for your help but I cant find hertz at that price you quoted. $187 is the lowest I saw on travelocity

AutoSlash

Looks like rates went up sometime in the last 8 hours. Sorry.

The National rate is still available.

ffly45

Pickup/Drop-Off Location: EWR or nearby 07102
Pickup Date and Time: 5/16/13 at 2:00pm
Return Date and Time: 5/24/13 at 2:00pm (would prefer to return around 5pm if possible)
Vehicle Size Preference: Mid-size
Memberships (AAA/USAA/airline FFP/etc): USAA, Hilton Gold (will sign up with Costco/BJ's/others if that gets me a better rate)
Best Price I've found: $212.14 at HLE with USAA CDP

p.s. i need the underage fee waived

g8trgr8t

sea
pickup 6/1
return 6/15
need full size SUV for family and luggage for 2 week roadtrip (expedition or suburban)

$585 a week is best I could find

chefshaun

First I wanted to say thank you for all of your help. I have a family trip coming up with six of us.

Pickup Location (airport, city, or ZIP code/postcode): SEA
Dropoff Location (if different) (airport, city, or ZIP code/postcode): SEA
Pickup Date and Time: 6/15/13 10am
Return Date and Time: 6/20/13 1pm
Vehicle Size Preference: Mini Van
Memberships (AAA/USAA/airline FFP/etc): AAA, AARP
Best Price you've found, Hertz or otherwise: Hertz $467.07

astonmartinv8

Pickup Location (airport, city, or ZIP code/postcode): LAS
Dropoff Location (if different) (airport, city, or ZIP code/postcode):
Pickup Date and Time: 6/17/13 1000
Return Date and Time: 6/25/13 1000
Vehicle Size Preference: Mercedes E-class
Memberships (AAA/USAA/airline FFP/etc): Amex plat (used CDP633306)
Best Price you've found, Hertz or otherwise: GBP456 / USD700

I'd love to hear about a PC I can use that will lower it further.

Ideally, I'd like to take the e-class and swap to a Camero ss for the last 2/3 days (as it is much pricier to rent separately) - is this feasible without additional charge?

Thank you in advance.

mooper

Hey Autoslash - I've used your site many times (and you've helped me within this thread) over the past couple of years. Have any car companies been removed/banned from your site in recent months? When I try to book, only a couple or three typically show, versus a dozen or so on Priceline and other sites. It used to be fewer, but not this few. I don't know if it is related, but I'm also not getting alerts that find a better price as readily. It's not a Spam folder issue or anything like that... I used to get alerts to rebook about 75% of the tie when I booked something in advance and let your system have months to work on it, but recently I've manually found better prices and yet no alert from Autoslash about them. Maybe just bad luck, or has anything changed on your end? Sorry for the questions flood, but also wondering if there's a common trick that helps with one-way rentals. Looking for full-size BDL>PVD Sept 5-10 and best I found was ~$290, but getting $700+ with Hertz. What's usually the best approach with these? Thanks!

AutoSlash

If you need the underage fee waived, stick with the USAA discount. It's usually the best publicly-available discount and the only way to legitimately waive the underage fee.

If you're willing to go about 5 miles away from the 07102 ZIP you specified, we found as low as $189.72 at a nearby HLE. Airport rates were almost double that.

You can keep the car until 5pm, but you'll pay an extra day if you picked it up at 2pm. Up to you whether it's worth it.

Since you didn't specify times, we assume noon to noon. Exact rates may vary if you change the pick-up/drop-off times.

Not clear if the $585 is before or after tax, but the best deal we found is with Alamo at $1,350.12 for the full rental, including all taxes and fees. Hertz was nowhere near this ($2,016.16).

That was for a Fullsize SUV (Tahoe or similar). If you need the extra length of the Suburban/Yukon XL, etc., a Premium SUV (PFAR) is available with Alamo or Hertz but is a fair step up in price.

Impressive that you got Hertz for $467.07. Rates have probably gone way up since you last looked. Best I could do for Hertz was $626.56 including AAA (which is usually one of the best CDPs available to the general public) and a PC code. Best rate available is $336.92 with Thrifty or, if you want a top-tier company, $440.62 with National.

Most PCs don't apply to Prestige Collection rentals. Happy Birthday, though! YGPM.

Not likely they'll allow you to swap to the Camaro SS without a charge. Rates are negotiable, though. Try playing hard-ball with the Gold Choice agent when you pick the car up to see if they'll give it to you for an affordable upgrade. They're on commission, so some is better than none for them.

We haven't updated the open letter on our site in awhile, but unfortunately, pretty much the entire industry doesn't like us and won't allow us to show their rates on our site. However, if you use our site and get a search result from anyone, even a low-end company like Payless, go ahead and book it. Our systems are designed to try to find a better price with a better agency, and in most cases, you should get an email within a few hours asking if you'd like to switch to a different (better) company, and we can still book you that way. If you check our site and don't get any results, either post here or send us an email (support at our site's domain name) with the same information requested at the beginning of this thread, and we can get you a price quote and help you with booking through all agencies.

Reservations booked on other sites and submitted to us for tracking need to be processed manually (we actually need to look your reservation up on the rental company's website and hand-copy all of the rental information into our price-tracking system), and we currently have an extremely long backlog of those requests. It's far faster for you to book with whatever company you find in our search results and wait a few hours for our automated system to send you a better offer or, failing that, to email us directly for a price quote. We recently brought on some additional help to work on clearing the backlog of tracked results, though, so we should have much better luck getting to those in a reasonable amount of time going forward. We're also working on a completely new version of our site that will make everything work much more smoothly. We'll announce more info on that as we can.

As for one-way rentals, there aren't any "tricks" per se. The reason one-way rentals are expensive is because, in general, the companies don't want their cars going to other places. Occasionally, they will run seasonal specials from and to certain parts of the country, such as from the Northeast to Florida for the snowbird season. There are typically discussions on FT about how to nab these specials. Unfortunately, Hertz often uses a custom field (the "RQ" field) to activate these specials, and this field does not map to anything offered in the travel agency GDS systems, so we currently have no way of searching for these discounts. Best to watch FT and follow the information given in those threads. That said, we're not aware of any specials between close cities like BOS and PVD. Rent from and return to BOS and take the commuter train or Amtrak?

mooper

Ah, that fully explains. I had wrongly presumed that manual submissions were automated once received, but the need to manually enter could understandably create a backlog. I'm certainly going to take your advice and try booking via whatever options show up on your site and see if that yields better results. Thanks for the prompt and thorough response!

ffly45

Now I'm curious... for purely informational purposes, what might be the "non-legitimate" [sic] ways of waiving this underage fee (hertz or otherwise)?

By the way, my uncle added me as an associate to his AAA membership today. So that is also now an option for me.

appreciate the help! thanks.