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The eclipse is happening in a week, and unfortunately I have no choice but to travel between Charleston, South Carolina–an eclipse viewing hotspot–and Atlanta, Georgia on August 23, just two days after the momentous event that’s drawing an estimated crowd of one million+ visitors to the coastal city. That means plane tickets are $$$ and there’s not a drop of Saver level award space to be seen.
Charleston and Atlanta are only a four and a half hour drive from each other. I don’t have my own car but renting one is always an option. A quick surface level search on kayak told me that renting a car for 24 hours would be much cheaper than any alternative.
I recently read about a service called AutoSlash that helps consumers get the lowest rate possible for their car rentals so have decided to give it a go.
What’s AutoSlash?
Essentially, AutoSlash helps you book the cheapest rate for your desired car rental. They provide two services that compliment each other, but there’s no requirement to use both if you’d rather search for your own rental.
Get a Quote
If you fill in all the details in the “Get a Quote for your car rental” box on the homepage (origin, destination if different than origin, dates, etc.), AutoSlash will send you a selection of the cheapest rates to your email. They will only send you rates with a Free Cancellation policy.
Track a Rental
Once you book a rental car, you input the reservation information into the other tab on their homepage and the information will be sent to AutoSlash to track. They will find whatever applicable coupons/promos/discounts they can and then test and apply them without you needing a lift a finger beyond filling out the track a rental form.
They also continuously check the daily rate of your car as it fluctuates as car rental rates are known to dramatically fluctuate over time. If/when a cheaper price is found, they will also re-book you at the lower price.
To be clear, you’re not required to book one of AutoSlash’s suggestions from their quote. You can book any car rental you desire as long as it has a free cancellation policy–without that you’d be locked into the rate you originally booked.
AutoSlash can find lower rates for domestic and international car rentals.
The Process
I enlisted AutoSlash’s help getting an original quote for a car rental with free cancellation and for finding coupons/discounts and tracking the daily rate. It was a simple process that took about 15 minutes (including wait time) to complete.
After filling out the quote request information on their homepage, I received an email from the AutoSlash team immediately that they had received my request and were working on it. About five minutes later I received an email with links to the lowest rates they had found.
Out of curiosity and just to double check, I searched myself on a few of the major aggregators to see if I could locate a better price with free cancellation. I could not.
I decided on the first and cheapest option, a car from Alamo through priceline.com.
After filling in all the necessary info and booking on Priceline, I took the reservation number from the confirmation email I received from Priceline and filled out the Track a Rental form on AutoSlash’s homepage.
A few minutes later I received a response.
And that’s it.
I was a bit confused about the final step–re-booking–as I haven’t gotten there yet. The AutoSlash website says they will re-book you automatically…
…but as you can see in the confirmation email above, it says I’ll be able to re-book at the lower rate if they find one.
Then I found my answer on their FAQ page.
If you have any questions that aren’t answered on the FAQ, you shouldn’t have to wait long for a response. I sent their team a couple questions when I was booking (by responding to the email I received with my quote) and was impressed by the response time–each within a matter of minutes.
Bottom Line
I’ve read rave reviews from numerous people that have saved hundreds using AutoSlash, particularly on longer term rentals. While I probably won’t save much money on a one day car rental, I’m excited to try AutoSlash just for the heck of it. It’s a great concept, free, and involves no extra work on my side.
Have any of you saved big using AutoSlash? Any negative experiences?
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Do you still get any elite benefits with the rental car companies? Can it take into account the discounts offered to some elite members or via having certain credit cards such as Amex Platinum?
So many of the premier travel credit cards come with elite status in rental car programs that I’m curious if this negates that.
I’ve found the best use of auto slash is eliminating the one way drop off fee.
@AndrewOnTheRoad Yep. These are just regular bookings–our secret sauce is simply identifying and adding the best coupon and discount codes to your booking. There aren’t any secret, special, opaque/prepaid/negotiated/limited rates involved, so all of your normal frequent renter profile information and elite status applies exactly the same as on a normal (undisounted) booking.
Since they don’t actually do the booking, I wonder if anyone has thoughts about what the business model might be.
I just checked them for my upcoming rental in November in MUC.
Since I am bi-lingual, I also checked with my favorite German portal, check24.de,
and I got a better rate.
You can use the tracking function at autoslash.com/track to have AutoSlash continue to track the rental for you. This way if a better deal comes along at a later date (which often happens), you’ll be notified of it.
[…] Hat tip to AutoSlash, who just saved me 30% on a car rental this week! […]