Kate and I rented a car for a long weekend drive to Minneapolis and back. Looking online, I found that there is a new Enterprise Rent-A-Car in Rogers Park, at 6816 N Clark Street (between Pratt and Farwell).
When making the reservation online, I found that I couldn't include the damage waiver and liability insurance in the online quote. This isn't that uncommon, as it seems that most rental companies don't allow you to include that in the online quote. This bothers me, though, because the insurance is an amorphous blob of a cost center, something they can puff up the price of at the counter to see if you're paying attention. (At least, that's been my experience in the past.) I wouldn't even utilize the insurance, but now that I have no car, why have car insurance? So, I use the car rental company's insurance when renting a car. Not cheap, but still cheaper than owning a car.
Doing my research onlilne, I found that Budget's online quotes can include insurance if desired, so I quoted it out via Budget as well, figuring that if I didn't like what I was hearing at the Enterprise counter, I'd walk and head on down to Budget instead.
Thankfully, that turned out not to be necessary. Enterprise called me an hour before my reservation, confirmed everything, and at my request, quoted me an updated price that included the damage waiver and liability insurance. (The full cost turned out to be much lower than Budget, too, even accounting for insurance.)
They provided me with a PT Cruiser, which is one of those many cars that I would never buy for myself, but it worked fine, and it was in very good shape. Very happy with it.
Long story short, next time we need to rent a car for an out-of-town trip, I'll go with Enterprise again.
3 comments:
Hi Al
you should check with your credit card companies. Some include car rental insurance if you use that card to rent the car. Before I bought a car and used to rent, I always used the card with the insurance. It saved a lot of money.
Nancy
(Kate's Cousin)
We always use Enterprise for weekend trips 'cause they pick us up and have cheap weekend rates (usually half off of weekday rates).
I'm pretty sure I have a credit card or two that would include insurance on rental cars or else that my AAA card would cover it, but I always forget to investigate before I go in so often end up getting extra insurance ('cause I have the minimum insurance on my van since it's already been totalled). I should check on this before our next trip.
Only bad experience we had with Enterprise was when they charged us $100 for a tiny scratch under the front bumper. Which I know was caused when the guy came to pick us up bottomed the car out in our driveway so it wasn't my fault and I didn't notice it on the original walk around. Grrr.
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