Category Archives for car rental.
Avis has a new service that lets you skip the bus to and from the airport rental center entirely, a concierge that delivers your car to you and that drives you back in the vehicle to the airport when you return it.
Make sure you’re stacking offers for the best deals on rideshare, and crediting your Lyft rides to either Alaska Airlines or to Bilt Rewards.
Advantage Rent A Car appears to be shutting down. The Las Vegas location apparently closed last week. Their flagship headquarters Orlando airport location closed yesterday. Franchise locations appear to still be open. A Dallas off-airport location also shows closed, and I’m hearing Denver as well. This was flagged to me by Jonathan of Autoslash which is both a great source of absolute best deals on car rentals and awareness for what’s going on in the industry. This is a scoop since it doesn’t appear the state of play of Advantage If a separate bankruptcy is filed (and for technical reasons it’s possible there wouldn’t need to be), it would be their fourth bankruptcy. A PACER search of the federal bankruptcy docket shows they haven’t filed a new one yet – just their May 2020 Chapter 11 case…
Hertz’s new AI system lets them go after 5 times as many customers as before. The rate at which they’re sending out bills is skyrocketing.
Now they scan cars as they’re being returned – vehicles drive through a camera‑and‑sensor tunnel and get an ‘MRI for vehicles’ to log damage in a way that rental staff never did before. It also finds hard to spot damage such as under the vehicle, uneven tire wear, hairline cracks in the windshield.
Hertz is installing more than 100 UVeye inspection portals at its biggest U.S. airport stations, starting with Atlanta, and full deployment is expected by the end of the year.
Since there’s no cost to participate, taking them up on the offer seems like an easy move to get Avis President’s Club and Radisson Hotels status which might be useful to match elsewhere. (And you can use Avis status to match to another rental car chain if you prefer that as well.)
Mike Johns was trying to get from Phoenix home to Los Angeles. He took a Waymo to the airport, only it wouldn’t stop looping around a parking lot instead of heading to the terminal.
You can rent someone’s car on Turo, as an alternative to renting from a company like Hertz or Avis. It’s not always as seamless a pickup at airports, but you’re renting a specific vehicle rather than a broad category. You can choose much nicer cars, or cheaper cars! Sometimes you’ll get a much better deal renting from a private party. And you can organize dropoffs at your hotel, too.
Yes, it was real. On Sunday I wrote about a Hertz customer being charged $10,000 for driving his rental car too much on a month-long, unlimited miles rental. And when he questioned the charge, he was threated with arrest.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
