An Introduction to AutoSlash.com

just emailed you about a much lower price for the same car and the CDP & PC #s, also your email to me said $71.92 yet when I pulled it up on Hertz it said $72.07, either way with the CDP & PC I emailed AS it should be $66.52

just sent a 2nd email with my Hertz # to be applied, as long as you can get me that same $66.52 I was able to confirm

* well AS reemailed me with the lower rate I found as mentioned above and happy to say I finally will be getting a car via AS. I do look forward to the day when I wont have to feed them all the info for the lower rates and their computer will find it on its own, be it with the company I originally booked with or a different one. Again its for the same lower rate I found but this way they can make a couple of bucks to help pay to keep AS afloat, which ends up helping everyone save some $$ off their rentals

gary whats the all about. I simply wanted to let them know that theres a difference in price. Its not the .15 persee but it can be .15 on mine and $10 on yours

then while playing around awhile ago I was able to nab an Economy (which I prefer) for $62.59 and modified my res for that. These guys arent gonna get rich off my res and Im sure they have to spilit it anyway with TC, but basically I did the work on it.

The car will be used to go from ONT to LA and to the hotels so after 4 days I'll be lucky to have put a few hundred miles on it, dont need no Jag nor any gas gussler just to jut around town.

Now if like you I had an employer paying for it then Id probably go with whatever and from whomever, but as long as Im on my Dime,I go with what I can make do with and have no problems doing so, and will modify the res to save yes $4

I wasn't giving you a hard time, craz! That wasn't a .. it was a .. I was amused by your finding the $0.15 discrepancy. You're right, I wouldn't have noticed it and wouldn't have realized it. Good on ya!

There's often a slight discrepancy with Hertz. Don't know why it is, but it's always less than $1.

And yes, we will make less than $2 in commission on your reservation, so while we're happy to help in any way that we can to get you the best deal possible and explain how AutoSlash works, there comes a point where we have to let the service speak for itself. I think we've reached that point. (and it goes without saying that we appreciate your biz!)

Ok sorry for my misunderstanding, but all I was trying to do is point out to AS that for some reason there was a difference in rates, for all I knew it might have been .015 with me a few $$ with someone else. Now that it was posted that AS knows about it and its usually < $1 had I known that I wouldnt have said anything.

and yes Im a person who looks at the details, could be $70.29 & 70.49 I wouldnt have caught, but $71.92 and 72.07 did since the Dollar amount was different even thou its was only .15 spread, then again it might have been better simply PMing or emailing them rather then post about it

thats understood as Im sure is,if I find I always have to contact AS in order to tell them how to get me the best rate and keep making several reses that its not worth my time, when all is said and done I can get that same rate on my own

AS is a GREAT service for certain types of people, and most likely till it becomes like Marriott.com where I can select which type of properties I only want to see or even All of them, be it by Cat or price or location then it wont work for me every time. And its possible it will never beable to work as I Need it to for the way I do things, but as long as it does work for the majority of people thats all AS needs to worry about.

all I did back when is read the 1st few posts that AS posted and what they said they were offering and since no limitations were posted I didnt expect any. So yes I thought I was able to chose Thrity for $109ai for an Economy car and then if a Compact or mid-size was cheaper even with Avis then AS would CX my Thrifty and book me with Avis instead. After my 1st few reses when I saw much cheaper rates and yet my res with AS was still at the booked rate or 1st revised rate, did you start to properly explain what AS can and can not do. And you also posted you hope sometime in the future to offer what I was talking about. Then some people I sent ASs way booked with 1 company and got an email saying if its OK with you AS can save you an additional amount but with Dollar instead of National, so I thought if it was done to them it should also have been done with my res, but as we all know it wasnt

everybody has their own terms for when they will modify something in order to save some extra $. For some they will fly AA instead of CO if the fare is at least say $5 cheaper while others it would have to be at least $50. Some will drive to PHL from NYC if the fare is at least $75 cheaper others not less then $200. Making a stop and not earning any extra EQMs no way , oh its $65 cheaper, no prob. The pt is both sides of the equation needs to make their own decisiions when something is worthwhile and when its best to wish the other side All the Best

I had thought I asked this question before but maybe not.
Is it possible to have multiple searches going on for the same time frame?
For example could I:
1. Set up a reservation with Hertz for oct 1-3
2. Set up a reservation with Avis for oct 1-3
3. Set up a reservation with National for oct 1-3
etc.
And then just keep the one that ends up being the lowest? I might be missing something obvious here.

Yes, it is possible to do this, but we will notify you if a better deal comes along from another company. I think the confusion here has been that we take company reputation and convenience into account in this process.

For example, if you're current booked with Hertz and a better deal comes along from Payless (which is almost a sure thing), we typically would not notify you. If we did, we'd be sending thousands of emails every day, and it would be bothersome to most people.

On the other hand, if you're booked with Payless and a better deal comes along from Hertz, then you'll most definitely be getting an email from us with the option to switch (the vast majority of people would jump at this).

When I say 'convenience', I mean that if you're currently booked with a company with a counter/vehicles at the terminal, then we're not going to offer you something that requires 2 shuttle rides to get to your vehicle.

You get the idea. It's an equal-to-or-better approach, which hopefully meets the needs of most people.

Now getting back to your original question, you can book multiple companies, but we prefer that you do not as it adds additional strain on our systems. If you feel that you must, please be courteous and cancel whichever reservations you won't be using. The no-show rate is bad enough in the car rental industry (30%+ in some cases), and if we (collectively) make it any worse, it's more incentive for the rental companies to institute no-show fees, and I don't think anyone wants that.

Not likely. It's probably the way that the taxes and fees are coded in the various reservation systems and transmitted to the GDSes. That will never result in a $10 difference.

Even Travelocity, which "guarantees" the "TotalPrice(TM)" they provide to you, only guarantees it to within 1%.

Hertz uses a particularly archaic software system, so I am not surprised this issue is especially prevalent with Hertz.

Yeah, sometimes the holes on those punchcards don't line up perfectly. That often results in a small discrepancy in price.

how many reg Joes know these details?

I thought if its not 100% then it could be off by who knows how much and why should I have assumed it was only with Hertz and not all the companys.

Few, which is why I posted it here. This is a discussion board for sharing information, is it not?

I will say that even as a thrifty individual with a limited travel budget, I would not have even brought up a tenth-of-one-percent difference...

Nothing I posted said that you should have assumed it was only with Hertz. That portion of my post was a response to AutoSlash's comment that it seems to happen primarily with Hertz and that that fact does not surprise me, given what I know about Hertz.

It has nothing to do with having the lower price upheld so it could be .05 difference, and Id still want to know why and alert the owners that their confirmation rate and that of the vendor does not match

and to Quote You .."This is a discussion board for sharing information is it not?" so anytime things dont match up it should be shared. Again as I posted before since 1 figure was $71.92 and the other $72.07 at 1st sight it looked like over a $1 difference I actually thought it said $72.97 but even for .15 Im the type that wants to know why its not the exact same amount. And when I posted I had no idea it pretained to Hertz and Hertz only

again sorry for trying to alert AS to something I had no idea they already knew about

I too found AS to be about 50 cents higher on my rental with ZE next weekend in OAK. I just assumed it was a tax calculation.

For .50 I figured I would try the service and the next day a 20.00 CP was applied by AS! I'll take the 19.50 savings

the difference maybe that you are relying on AS for codes, and dont know them yourself, therefore you had a $20 reduction that you wouldnt have known to have been able to get. Had you known the CDP or PC info you could have found it on your own

so AS is very good for a person such as yourself that dont know the different codes or does but doesnt want to be bothered putting them all in to get the lowest rate. Which is great if Hertz is the only company that you want to rent from. But if like me you couldnt care which company you end up but want the cheapest then youd have to plug away putting in all the codes by all the companys to see who in the end is the cheapest as I do.

I do the same with my air tkts, I prefer UA but if eg AA is alot cheaper Id buy the tkt from AA, thusly why I will checkout eg Orbitz rather then UA when looking for a tkt. There are people out there that couldnt care they want UA and UA only, then going to UA.com makes sense

Im that you were able to save yourself some $ and that AS works for you

Exactly For me, I don't have nor want to spend the time chasing down rental car codes. It's just not an area I'll put a lot of effort into research. Air tickets and hotels are a differeent story

or a friend called me as he was about to get onto his flight, he just got a call that he had to take someone with him driving LA-Vegas and he already had a person in Vegas that was gonna be coming back with him. An economy or compact wasnt gonna do it , thats what he reserved on his own. He called me and asked me to plug away at it and book him a full or mid size depending on the price

I told him go to AS and chose which ever company is the cheapest and by the time he gets to the WC, Im sure AS will have cut some fat off the rate. He didnt want FOX but it was alot cheaper then anyone else at such a late hour., for a pick-up in just a few hours

this is why Im not saying AS isnt any good, simply because it is!

if you fall within its parameters and many a person falls right into it ,so it works for them and for AS. Personally I just wish they had detailed what they were capable of doing from get go so that I wouldnt have been under some misunderstandings, of what they werent capable of doing

heres why AS wont be to me what it can be to You.

I was planing on another trip out to the LA area for the 2nd weekend in Nov. Didnt purcahse any tkts but had some ideas in mind, then yesterday I was told 2 friends of mine from out there kids got engaged to each other on Sun, and the wedding maybe 11/9.I usually fly out there Thurs to Mon, and no cheap flight to get me there in time on 11/9. So I looked at 11/8 (didnt book) but I can get a tkt for $298+ (minus a ecert so $90 out of pocket). landing late on Tues means I wont need a car till Weds and that means a weekly rental till Mon. A quick check w/o any codes was throwing up apx $230 with some codes it came down to $170 still too high for me and for an Economy car

So I flipped a switch and priced 11/9 - 10 as a 1 day and then a Thurs -Mon weekend with codes I got it down to $119 for all 5 days, using 2 different companys didnt like $45ai for that 1 day but $121 total was alot better then $170 or 230, still waiting to hear if the wedding will actually be on 11/9 but at least Im covered car wise. took me all of 10 mins to workout the above.

Great thinking and planning

Now, I wouldn't be willing to do the work, or the switch a roo of car companies even though it is a big savings.

Way to many parameters to code for in an application to account for these type of things. I would think the majority of people wouldn't be willing to change car companies and/or have separate contracts as well.

What I can see you doing though if you are willing is do your homework and then dump the res into A/S and see if they come up with anything less. You're willing to do all the work up front and I can't see A/S ever coding for every possible exception. Doesn't hurt to see if they can drop it a few more bucks.

On my first attempt with AuoSlash I saved about $30 on a two-day rental. Maybe I would have found the cheaper rate myself I I had checked a week or so before pick-up time, but the notification of the rebooking was great news. I'll be using it for future reservations as well.

Not a huge deal, but I made a reservation via Autoslash for a Sixt rental in Germany. When I tried to look up the details, specifically the rate code used, on the Sixt site, I couldn't pull it up because I didn't have a security code. I could not get a security code because there was no e-mail address associated with the reservation as made by Autoslash. Is it possible for the Autoslash API to pass that information to the reservation?

This is a limitation of SIXT and the 3rd party booking system we use unfortunately. For most other vendors, it's not an issue and you can look up reservations made via AutoSlash, but SIXT has this extra security layer (Europeans tend to be much more security conscious) which makes it impossible to do so. It's only an issue with SIXT, and I don't see it changing anytime soon.

That makes sense, and thanks for the reply.