On the Justice of Squeaking Wheels: made whole by filling out an automated survey

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Anybody who knows me knows, the only thing I hate more than driving is renting cars. It combines all the worst features of the travel experience: you’re charged a constantly fluctuating price (thanks Autoslash!), with ambiguous requirements (do I qualify for a USAA rate as a member, or is that for employees of USAA?), face unlimited liability for anything that happens on the road in an unfamiliar car, and are upsold at every single step of the transaction. It’s a terrible experience for customers, and I imagine an even more terrible experience for the cashiers who have to deal with a stream of furious customers all day every day.

I’ve tried to eliminate as many of these variables as possible over the years. In 2020, I bought non-owner car insurance from USAA for the first time to cover personal liability while driving a rented car. I naturally pay for my rentals with a credit card that includes insurance for the value of the car itself. And I fuel rental cars before returning them to avoid paying their extortionate fuel charges.

But that leaves one pain point: picking up and returning the car itself. Different rental car companies have tried to address this in a variety of ways: elite check-in desks, “choose your own car” gimmicks (National’s “Emerald Aisle,” Budget’s “Fastbreak,” etc). But I’m not actually that annoyed by waiting in line for a rental car. After all, I just waited in line to check my bags, waited in line to board, waited to get off the plane, waited to collect my checked bags, and waited to take a shuttle to the rental car lot. What do I care if I have to wait another 15 minutes to get the car keys?

No, what drives me nuts is how car rentals are so completely unlike any other element of the travel experience, and no lesson you learn anywhere else can be applied to understanding how rental car companies operate:

  • an airline schedules a set of flights, some of which take off late and some of which land early. But one flight landing early (besides giving the pilots and flight attendants a little more time to use the bathroom or get a bite to eat) doesn’t make any other flight take off any earlier, and in fact realistically is more likely to clutter up the taxiways and gates.

  • a hotel sets a check-in time and check-out time, which they’re typically willing to be flexible about if your room is ready early or you want to keep it a bit longer, assuming there isn’t another guest about to check in.

Car rental companies operate more like private jet services or love hotels. You can show up early, or check-out late, but you’re definitely paying for every minute you have possession of the car.

Getting charged for showing up early

Over the New Years holiday my partner and I flew to Hawaii where we met up with my mother-in-law (yes, I know this is also the plot of the Netflix limited series “White Lotus”). Our flight was scheduled to land around 1 pm and hers around 3, so I booked a weekly car rental at the only-slightly-off-airport Budget Car Rental site, with a pickup and dropoff both scheduled for 1 pm on Wednesdays, a week apart.

Then our flight got in early — very early. We were scheduled to arrive at 12:50 pm but were already at the Budget office at 11:30 am. We didn’t have anything else to do (the Kona airport is kind of in the middle of nowhere) so we decided to pick up the car and drive into town to explore for a couple hours.

I popped in to see if the car was ready yet, and after a few minutes in line, was asked “when are you returning the car?” I naturally replied, “I have it reserved until 1 pm,” and the cashier responded, “but you’re picking it up early. That means you need to return it early.”

And she was right!

After stressing about it for 7 full days, I managed to get the car back at 12:20 pm the following Wednesday — 40 minutes before the end of my original reservation, but 50 minutes after my 7-day “week” expired.

They stuck me with a fee that was, for one hour, a full 14% of the cost of the week-long rental.

But then they gave me my money back

On January 5, in what must have been just a few minutes after returning the car to the lot in Kona, I received one of those thousands of automated e-mails asking for feedback on my experience renting from Budget. Like any normal person, I never complete these surveys unless something is obviously amiss or an employee goes above and beyond. But since I was still steaming about this stupid “late” return charge, I went ahead and filled out the survey.

Shockingly, 5 days later, I received another message from the same generic survey provider:

Thank you for taking the time to tell us about your recent experience. We appreciate your feedback since it helps us improve our service and your rental experience.

I deeply regret that we were not able to meet your expectations regarding your previous rental. We will send in an adjustment for the extra hour charge. Please allow 7-14 business days for this to reflect on your end.

I wasn’t exactly convinced this would actually happen (the e-mail address’s domain was “app.medallia.com”), but was willing to watchfully wait. Then, as much to my surprise as yours, on January 26, 21 full days after I returned the car, Budget refunded me almost $100, which seems to actually be slightly more than they charged me for the extra hour, even accounting for taxes and fees.

Conclusion

I know this was a long way to go to complain about how terrible rental car companies are, which is why I’m trying to make a slightly different point: sometimes, somebody actually reads those surveys you submit after flying, staying at a hotel, or renting a car, and if they do, then making as specific, particularized complaints (or praise!) as possible seems likeliest to get the most favorable results.

What travel partner should you credit car rentals to?

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I detest driving, so we haven’t owned a car in years, and I try my best to design vacations that don’t require a private vehicle. In recent years, that started to slip, and we started to rent cars 2-3 times a year. During the pandemic, the change accelerated when nearby driving vacations became the only ones available.

90% of the time we rent from Hertz simply because their nearby location typically offers the lowest prices on Autoslash, and I add my Hertz Gold Plus Rewards number to those reservations, but the main advantage seems to be saving my credit card, insurance, and fuel preferences: the program just isn’t that valuable.

In the last year, I’ve spent $936.64 on four Hertz rentals and earned a grand total of 737 points (one of the rentals didn’t credit to my account for some reason, either because Autoslash put me in an ineligible booking code or I forgot to re-add the reservation to my Hertz profile after booking through Priceline, a tedious necessity). That’s not quite enough points for a single day standard car rental subject to blackout dates, which costs 750 points.

It was only when I recently needed to make a reservation with Avis that I remembered it’s also possible to earn partner miles and points on these reservations. I had assumed that those partnerships were of trivial value, since the points you earn with a program are almost always more valuable than those earned with partners. That turned out to be exactly wrong: airline miles are almost always more valuable than points earned in rental car programs.

Since I wasn’t able to find any useful information about car rental programs on non-affiliate sites, I realized I needed to research and cover these programs more closely myself.

Hertz Gold Plus Rewards

The main problem with Hertz, and the reason it took me so long to figure out their rewards, is that their website is held together with twine. You can save partner loyalty account numbers to your Hertz account by navigating to “My Profile” and editing your “Membership Details” (don’t forget to hit “update” on the bottom of the page in order to save your accounts).

In principle, the terms of the program are clear that you must decide whether to earn Hertz Gold Plus Rewards points or partner loyalty points. In fact, I was able to submit a “Retroactive Credit Form” for two recent rentals and received an e-mail confirming two sets of 500 miles were headed to my Alaska Mileage Plan account. They haven’t arrived yet (they give themselves 4-6 weeks) and I don’t know if they ever will, but if so they represent a potential double dip opportunity.

Each partner loyalty program has its own earning rate, so the optimal choice depends on your precise rental:

Note that when crediting a rental to an airline partner, Hertz charges a surcharge to recover the excise tax; I’m not sure how or whether that surcharge is recovered when you request retroactive airline credit.

Avis

Avis’s website works a lot better than Hertz’s, and makes it easy to select an airline partner by navigating to “My Profile,” then “Rewards,” then editing your “Rewards Program.” You can select either “Avis Preferred Points,” or one of their partner loyalty programs.

As in the case of Hertz, earning rates vary by partner, so you’ll want to select a travel partner before each rental to maximize the value of your rewards. Here are my top choices:

Thrifty

I have my first Thrifty car rental coming up in December and while I’m not worried, I’m certainly frustrated by their primitive website; I haven’t even been able to create a “Blue Chip Rewards” account in order to save my partner loyalty programs and manage my reservation. Hopefully somebody else will notice and complain loud enough to get the site fixed by the time my reservation rolls around. In any case, as with the first two programs, you’ll want to choose which program to credit your rental to depending on its length:

National

Unlike the above three programs, National’s Emerald Club does earn rewards worth considering, especially if you make a lot of short rentals. Since you earn one “rental credit” for all rentals up to 7 days, and one free rental day for every 6 credits, the program can provide an outsized rebate value: 6 cheap one-day rentals earn you enough credits for an expensive one-day rental. If you find yourself spreading your car rentals across multiple companies, however, it may take you years to accumulate those 6 rental credits, and you’ll likely be better off crediting your rentals to one of their loyalty partners.

Conclusion

In my experience the price differences between rental car companies are so large, and the quality differences so small, that it would never make sense to be “loyal,” or even have a slight preference, for one rental car company over another. Your own situation may well differ, with the most obvious example being a company with a deeply discounted corporate rate that you can use on business and leisure trips alike. In that case, you might find rental car rewards worth earning on reimbursed travel and redeeming on your own vacations.

But unless you rent cars from the same company year-round, it’s likely worth tactically crediting your rentals to partner programs, based on their length, cost, and earning rate.

Why are some Visa cards dropping collision damage waiver coverage?

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As I tweeted out on Friday, I was surprised to get an e-mail from US Bank telling me that my Flexperks Travel Rewards card would no longer have “Auto Rental Collision Damage Waiver and Extended Warranty Protection” as of February 1, 2021. Today I saw Doctor of Credit report that several additional Visa cards will be dropping the same or related benefits.

All of which made me wonder, what the heck is going on?

Virtually all credit and debit cards include rental car collision damage waivers

I’ve written extensively about the nuances of rental car insurance in the past, since it’s a particularly complicated issue for folks who don’t own their own cars. That’s because car owners typically have liability insurance that covers them whether or not they’re driving their own cars, while non-car owners have to patch together liability (you hit somebody) and collision (you hit a tree, or an uninsured driver hits you) coverage.

Since most travel hackers are sufficiently well-to-do to own at least one vehicle, rental car insurance is typically put in terms of the collision damage waiver coverage when you pay for a rental car with your credit or debit card, and is framed in terms of “primary” versus “secondary” coverage, the difference being that secondary coverage kicks in after your car-owner insurance, leaving you potentially subject to penalty premia going forward, while primary coverage sidesteps your preexisting insurance.

This is all extremely boring, since virtually all credit and debit cards offer at least secondary rental car collision damage waivers. All you really need to know is to decline the collision damage waiver coverage offered by the rental car company when you check in.

Until February!

Rethinking value?

The main reason credit and debit cards offer collision damage waiver coverage is that it’s so cheap to provide: most people don’t get into rental car accidents most of the time, most people who do get into rental car accidents have their own insurance coverage, and most rental cars aren’t that expensive. It’s basically the Gerber Life Insurance of benefits: you make a lot of people feel good about their life decisions without ever having to pay out a claim. Paying out the occasional claim to replace a bare-bones Toyota Camry isn’t even a blip on Visa’s balance sheet.

Of course, the flip side is that people who never use a benefit are unlikely to appreciate it, no matter how cheap it is to provide. So theoretically the offer of “ID Navigator Powered by NortonLifeLock and Postmates benefits” to replace collision damage waiver coverage might be more immediately tangible to some current Visa cardholders.

But let’s not kid ourselves: that’s almost certainly not what’s going on.

Changing processors

The most obvious explanation for what’s going on is that US Bank and some related entities (e.g. “Elan Financial Services,” a wholly owned subsidiary of US Bank) are switching credit card processors. Unlike many banks, US Bank has continued to issue both Visa and American Express cards, so I assume that the current transitional period is going to be used to move some or all cardholders from Visa to American Express (or vice versa!).

If you rely on credit card collision damage waiver coverage, be careful!

By February 1 ,2021, we’ll have a much clearer view of the situation. Was the announcement of the discontinuation of rental car insurance benefits a holding pattern while the benefits for revamped cards are negotiated and rolled out, or a permanent devaluation? It’s an interesting question, but not an actionable one.

The actionable question is, what credit or debit card are you going to use to book your next car rental? If you rely on the collision damage waiver coverage provided by your bank, make sure your bank actually offers it.

What I learned from a week using Autoslash

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Long-time readers know I detest driving, which can lead to funny situations like taking an Uber from Houston to Galveston, but due in large part to lifecycle effects I’ve recently found myself renting cars more and more. With newly limited vacation time (out of grad school) and increased income (thanks, Obama), it can make much more sense to rent a car than to rely on public transportation or put-upon relatives.

For reimbursed business travelers, car rentals can play an important role in a travel hacking practice, since they’re a bonus category on many credit cards (either as part of the “travel” category or as a bonus category in their own right), you can easily earn free rental days to use for personal travel, and the car rental agencies also partner with other loyalty programs like airlines, hotels, and Amtrak if you prefer those rewards.

But since I’m not a reimbursed business traveler, my focus is on keeping costs as low as possible. That’s where Autoslash is supposed to come in.

What is Autoslash?

Autoslash has gone through a number of iterations over the years. I believe they used to automatically rebook car rental reservations as lower rates became available, but lost the ability to do that some time ago, so now they offer two slightly different features:

  • “Get a Quote” allows you to submit a request for specific rental dates and times. A few hours after submitting a request, they e-mail a link to their results, which then send you to Priceline to complete the reservation.

  • “Track a Rental” allows you to submit existing reservation details, and Autoslash will send an e-mail if they detect lower prices. This feature works the same as “Get a Quote,” except that it will continue to monitor your reservation so if even lower rates become available you’ll be notified.

I’m not 100% sure if you book through a “Get a Quote” Priceline link if Autoslash automatically also creates a “Track a Rental” submission. I’m not sure about that because, as we’ll get to shortly, Autoslash has some shortcomings.

Rental #1: Minivan Success for Thanksgiving

Of my three recent experiences using Autoslash, this was by far the most successful: the system worked exactly as it was supposed to:

  • I submitted the dates and time I needed through the “Get a Quote” function, and received my quote an hour or so later.

  • I then pulled the corporate account number and coupon codes out of the Priceline reservation and plugged them into a new National Car Rental reservation, after clicking through to National from Lemoney, which offered the highest cashback earning rate (after applying my “Turbo Credits”).

  • I found the same rate and completed the reservation with National.

I then submitted my reservation details as a “Track a Rental” request to Autoslash, and a few hours after that they found an even lower rate, which I was able to use to rebook my rental.

This was Autoslash at its best: it found a low price for an oddball vehicle type I never would have thought to search for, found and applied a corporate code and a coupon code, and delivered a lower price than I would have found on my own.

Rental #2: Autoslash Errors over Christmas

If Rental #1 was an unqualified success, Rental #2 was a bust. The Autoslash e-mail linked to rates that weren’t available on Priceline or on National’s own site. I ended up copying over Autoslash’s rate codes to get the same rate available on Priceline, which was $50 or so higher than the rate Autoslash was advertising.

I then plugged the rate details into the “Track a Rental” feature, and quickly got another e-mail from Autoslash with the same advertised rate they couldn’t actually produce once I clicked through to Priceline!

So, I might have booked a better rate than I could have found on my own, but a higher rate than the one Autoslash was promoting. Call this one a wash.

Rental #3: Autoslash Breakdown for Halloween

This week we made a last minute decision to drive out to West Virginia for some birthday leafing, so I hopped onto Autoslash to see what our options were. A nearby hotel has a Hertz office, so I plugged in the address and our dates to see what was available.

A few hours later, I got the usual Autoslash e-mail, clicked through, and saw the only rental options were miles away. I tinkered with Priceline’s search options, and submitted another, even more specific Autoslash request, but simply couldn’t find our local Hertz office listed.

So, I headed over to the Hertz website, plugged in the same address, and was immediately informed that the local Hertz office is only open until noon on Sundays. Once I submitted a third Autoslash “Get a Quote” request with noon as the return time, I received another Autoslash quote I was able to successfully plug into the Hertz website, again after clicking through the Lemoney cashback portal.

Conclusion: all this is fine except…the Autoslash folks are weird jerks

If you’re bored by this point, that’s fine. I was bored by this point too: I hate driving, I hate renting cars, I hate the work that goes into hunting down discounts, and I hate the fact that I do it anyway because if I don’t I’ll feel like I got ripped off.

The most straightforward thing you can say about Autoslash is that it was supposed to solve that problem, and it doesn’t.

Using Autoslash made booking my rental cars take hours and hours longer than it would have otherwise. Thankfully, I have a travel hacking blog, so I get to write it up for the edification of my readers.

But if you don’t have a travel hacking blog, this is just work, and it’s not work that pays very well. And making it all even better, the Autoslash team themselves seem like total jerks. After spending hours figuring out why they weren’t returning rentals at my local Hertz office, I asked for help on Twitter, and they immediately replied:

“Shouldn't be any need to recreate our rates @ Hertz—you get the exact same rates and Gold bennies via our links to Priceline *and* you get to support a small bootstrapped startup that employs fellow @FlyerTalk members you prbly know personally. Pls don't steal use of our service!”

So I went from being pissed off by how bad their service was to being accused of “stealing” use of their service! Not a great look, as they say.

Conclusion

I’ll keep using Autoslash for my increasingly-frequent car rental needs, but it’s just one tool, and hopefully this post has spelled out some of the things you need to watch out for: advertised rates that aren’t actually available, Autoslash not knowing the working hours of local rental offices, and the amount of portal cashback you’re sacrificing by using their Priceline affiliate links. In other words, it’s not a tool you can rely on exclusively, but needs to be combined with your own outside research.

On that last point: if Autoslash worked consistently well, I wouldn’t mind giving up a few bucks in portal cashback by using their affiliate links. But the fact that they don’t work consistently well and fly to the attack against users who are troubleshooting their errors doesn’t exactly endear them to me.

If you’ve had better luck than me using Autoslash, feel free to sound off in the comments.