Visit consolidator site before booking rental
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Posted on: January 28th, 2008 by Martin Fellowes
One of the best ways to save on car rentals is to visit a consolidator site—like Expedia or Travelocity—before contacting a car hire firm directly in order to reserve a vehicle, or receive a quote. Although rental rates vary widely and they tend to change without any prior notice, most renters find that their car hire experience is more pleasant and less frustrating, if they first verify all rates across the board by visiting a consolidator or comparator. This saves the client from having to fill out dozens of interactive forms on various rental sites, since portals like Expedia will do all the searching for the client and often come up with the most competitive prices on the market.
Once the system has generated a set of results, clients should record the top three lowest offers. With this in hand, the next step is to pick up the phone and contact the largest rental firms, informing them of what you found and asking them if they can offer even better prices. Most industry experts believe that this is the best way to get a rate even lower than that offered within the context of an advertised promotional.
Other sites that allow clients to save money on rentals are those such as Hotwire, where the customer will be able to reserve a car, but will not be told the rental firm’s name until the booking has been completed. Although this type of “blind’ travel may be unnerving when booking a hotel room, it should not matter in the case of rental firms as all major companies abide by similarly strict rules when it comes to the age of the fleet or the maintenance of vehicles.
www.expedia.com
Krystal Pinson
I work for the call center of a car rental company which the brand shall not be named, and let me just let you all know that that method is futile.
The only way to get the special rates given by sites like travelocity or orbitz or whatever, is to BOOK IT ON THEIR SITE. Those websites and the car rental companies have agreements for them to be able to provide lower rates than the companies themselves. If you compare rates on other websites do NOT expect the same rate when you call the car rental company over the phone. Most of the time we are not able to match those rates. If you want that rate, book it with the 3rd party website, and don’t start griping to us over the phone that we can’t match the rate. I get several customers EVERY DAY that do this. All I can tell them is to BOOK IT ON THE THIRD PARTY WEBSITE if you want that rate. I can’t stress that enough. People assume that the sales reps have wayy more power than we really do, and I wish that they’d know better.