If you’ve been around miles and points travel at all, you are probably familiar with Autoslash. It’s an awesome tool for finding the best publicly available car rental rates, and then monitoring rates and sending a notification if a better rate comes available for your rental.
Sometime last year, Autoslash stopped offering to book most rentals, and sends you to Priceline instead, where you can book and then go plug your confirmation number in under the ‘Track a Rental’ tab on Autoslash. It works, but there are at least a couple of problems with this:
- Car rental companies will prioritize direct bookings if they run out of cars. We had this happen on an Autoslash/Priceline Avis booking in Belize this spring, and we wound up getting walked to a different (local) agency and getting a smaller car for the same price.
- You generally lose the ability to skip the line if you book through a 3rd party such as Priceline.
So, here’s what I now do, in screenshots:
For reference, these are the rates on Priceline and National without going through Autoslash.
Autoslash rate is better!
Clicking through took me to this Priceline page, where I went ahead and booked.
The Priceline confirmation screen has the codes I needed all along! I went ahead and pasted these into a National search…
Don’t just use these codes, get the best ones for your rental by clicking through Autoslash and Priceline first!
Much better, and I can go ahead and pay $6 to skip the counter and get on the road!
Notice the rate is for ‘National.com last minute specials’, not some corporate code that I’m not technically eligible for. This is the best method I’ve found to get the best possible rate while avoiding the headaches that could come with ‘hacking’ car rentals further. Note that I can still plug my National confirmation in at Autoslash to get updates for lower rates.
It’s been just about forever since I posted, I’m glad to see the blog still works! Maybe I’ll post some more stuff if I feel like doing some trips reports, or stumble on some more overlooked-but-shareable tips.
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