A reminder to people renting cars: do your best to use a premium travel card.
I use the Sapphire Preferred because it offers PRIMARY damage insurance for your rental.
That means it will kick in before your own home car insurance has to. (It does not cover injuries and damages to others cars AFAIK, so make sure your home insurance does cover rentals for those insurance needs. It probably do.)
Reason for my reminder: leaving the Charlotte Hyatt Centric at 4:40am this morning we found our Dodge Durango rental had a smashed rear window. They also smashed a Dodge Charger two slots down and probably a third non Dodge we didn’t confirm.
Didn’t have time to think about it, just kept moving and dropped it off at airport. Good times.
When I checked my National account later yesterday, the car was still not marked as returned which started making me nervous. When we had arrived at drop off, the rental guy said the system was down so they were going to check in cars later.
So, I called National customer service about 5pm yesterday - after explaining the situation, first rep put me on hold for several minutes then told me to go to the Charlotte counter and clear it up.
My Dude, I just told you I dropped the car off at the airport before 5AM this morning, I am thousands of miles away. He said “Oh, then I’ll forward you to customer service.” Thought I was already?
Second rep contacted the Charlotte National location and came back saying they were going to close it out for me.
This morning I checked my National account and car was still not marked as returned.
Tried calling the Charlotte site directly - automated system seemed to send me back to a call center again, but this time didn’t sound like I was in an out of country call center like yesterday’s. Rep checked it himself then sent another message asking them to check it in.
A few minutes later it did drop off of my open rentals - but now it doesn’t even appear on my past rentals!
I wish it just had closed normally, in my experience this kind of weird glitch is a precursor to more weirdness, like them coming back at me 6 months from now asking where the car is. Guess it is wait and see time.
I really try to call early to mid morning just to get in country call center folk. They seem to have actual experience and aren’t simply running down a checklist of response possibilities.
I’ve also learned to say “manager” to the computer answerer when it wants to know why I’m calling.
If you know enough Spanish to get through the menus and to a human, the first thing you can ask said human is if they speak English? Just admit that you got through the menus by luck or something Generally, they are American workers who are fluent in English and Spanish.
Back again a year later to post this year’s 50% off TripIt code if anyone is interested -
I cancelled my auto-renewal subscription awhile back and am just waiting for the current year to expire so I can re-up at $24/year.
Then I’ll re-up using the code: BlkFri24.R <-That’s a link.
I don’t recall if I mentioned this too often in previous posts - but another tool I love in TripIt is that you can just forward your email confirmations from hotels, airlines, rental cars, girl scout cookie orders* to their “plans” email address and it will create or add to your trip itinerary automagically for you.
*i may be mistaken on one of those things listed
Travel Stats is fun too, although the depiction could use a little more zhuzh.
Cleaning up some bookmarks on my browser today, I happened on my old Sam’s Club Travel link, so thought I’d give it a look since it has been awhile.
…and, surprisingly found a rare time when Sam’s works out cheaper!
(Sam’s is powered by Tickets At Work, as are some other “discount” sites live Govx.)
Don’t get too excited of course, really just posting this as a hmmm than something that will save a bunch of money.
Checking an After Hours HS ticket, Sam’s comes in about $6.80 less than directly from Disney or via the Disney convention site (which are the same) - if you take into account a 5% savings you could easily get using discounted Disney gift cards.
Sam’s also beats Undercover Tourist by $1.50 per adult ticket. Woo!
All things being equal, in this scenario I would devote less mental cycles to the purchase and just go with UT - and since they show up as Travel when using a credit card, if your card has a travel eraser benefit, you could use points to pay for them. (Maybe not the highest use for points, but if you just want to save money, I’m for it!)
Anyone who has an Amex Plat and wants to use their Fine Hotels and Resorts annual credit, (I’ve mentioned it back in the thread.) there is a nice search engine out there to help you find any good deals at the FHR hotels:
The Amex hotel search site design is pretty darn slow and awful (they show you the room listings in a scrolling window 2/3 the size of the browser! And trying to find dates that have a price worthy of using your credit is a slog - find the hotel, enter a date, check the price, change the date, wait for it to refresh, look at the price… AND you have to keep making sure that Amex didn’t UN-CHECK the box limiting the search to FHR resorts.
There have been a few times I almost booked something then realized that happened, the resort I chose was just a “regular” listing and not FHR, so would not have gotten the credit.
In MaxFHR, you enter a location and it gives you a simple list of resorts: