dillybravo

I have a National weekly rental starting on Friday. Booked through Priceline with an estimated total of $268.95. Happened to see the reservation on my National app and it shows the estimated total is $838.47.

I called National and the agent there suggests that $838.47 is the rate I will be charged at the counter; they see nothing about $268.95 anywhere. Chatted with Priceline online and they say that their quoted rate of $268.95 is correct.

I have no idea if I should show up and it will all magically be resolved. Or plan to pay the higher rate and take it up with Priceline/credit card issuer. Or attempt to resolve in advance somehow.

Anyone with past experience or advice? Canadian rental and credit card which may make some difference but happy to hear suggestions based on other locales as well.

Edited to add: the difference is in the base rental rate, not in taxes/fees/insurance.

ElmhurstNick

Is this a one-way? I have seen National Canada charge per mile fees for those.

dillybravo

Hmm, it is a one-way but within the same city. It's possible, though I do them all the time with National and mileage isn't included in the quote. Thank you for the suggestion.

Anyway, outcome is as follows: this was a booking I made using AutoSlash. AutoSlash uses Priceline to make the bookings. I contacted AutoSlash as well, and they said they had seen this issue lately with National bookings through Priceline, and that when the customer arrived at the counter, the higher rate on National's system was applied.

AutoSlash offered to make a replacement booking at another agency, and cover the difference in rate, as well as the cost of an Uber to get there. So kudos to AutoSlash for their excellent support and thumbs down to Priceline for the run-around I got from them. (I called a couple times, even escalated, and just got drones repeating that "Priceline guarantees the rental rate reserved is what you will pay" and then when asked how I should use that guarantee, said that "it would be the rental agency's responsibility to address the overpayment, not Priceline's" ).

zdcatc12

I use Autoslash also, but I skip the Priceline part. Choose your car off of the first Priceline page; that pops up a second Priceline page with the details of the rental. Scroll down to Reward Points and Discounts and enter those on the actual rental car agency website using the same dates and times that you used on Autoslash. Wahla---you get the same price as you would through Priceline, but this makes the reservation direct with the rental car company!! This also allows you to see what those discount rates are!!! The last one that I did through Autoslash for Advantage was for Gaytravel, got me a car for $12/day!! Hope this helps.

AutoSlash

Sure, you can reverse-engineer the discount codes we find (and it's on our roadmap to better disclose the discount that's being applied), but I have to say I'm a little disappointed that you're basically advocating theft-of-service in the open here. We freely offer our service to everyone, but we do have bills to pay--not only our extremely helpful and responsive staff that provide a high-level of expert customer service with record response times and our site infrastructure but also the hours of employee time we spend each week digging through dozens of emails, websites, Twitter feeds, and what have you to find and curate coupon codes...and even the pricing data so we can find those rates for you.

When you book through our links, it allows us to continue doing all that heavy lifting for you. When you intentionally bypass that, you're basically stealing from us. If there's a problem with the rental rate during or after booking through our links, let us know and we're glad to investigate and work with our customers to use alternate booking channels on a case-by-case basis when the normal channels don't work, but please don't intentionally bypass our links, and certainly please don't openly advocate doing so on a public discussion forum.