Now Covid is less of a problem, it’s time to take my kids to visit their grandmother in Atlanta. Our last visit was three years ago.
The plan is to go for four weeks in late July to late August.
My mother no longer has a car and we’ll need one for a month.
I’ve looked at turo, a car sharing site, like an AirBnB for cars, and the prices are cheaper than normal car rental companies.
Does anyone have any experience with that or other sites?
As our car insurance doesn’t cover cars rented overseas, I need to get insurance. Insurance at traditional car rental companies is pricy. Are there any alternatives?
We are on a budget don’t have to get the cheapest option.
I’ve heard of horror stories about various rental companies if we go that way. What are people’s experiences with them?
I have almost no relevant info on the questions you asked. But first …
A factor you didn’t mention that may or may not be important to you: How severe a problem is it for you & family if you get to ATL and find your car arrangements collapsed in a heap of screw-ups and/or fraud? Do you curse, walk over to the Avis counter, stand in the interminable line, pay the walk-up rate, and drive away for a month? Do you have to somehow cobble together another even rickety-er backup plan while wasted from jet lag & lack of sleep w crying kids underfoot while racing the clock to get to Grandma’s before [whatever] big family event happens? IOW, what’s your tolerance for SNAFUs?
If low, you’ll probably need to plan to pay extra now for more robust arrangements to “insure” against a worst case you can’t stand then.
Back to my “almost”.
There are a number of minor league US franchise car rental places that specialize in long-term rentals, mostly for the market of: “my car is being repaired after a crash; I need another for 3-6 weeks.” In most cases these cars are being paid for by insurers, who like cheap rates. And the insurer’s customers are OK with “free car” even if it is a bit crappy / cheapo. Those same outfits rent to ordinary retail schmoes like you and I by the day, week, or month. They’re mostly not airport-affiliated nor airport-adjacent. But with the advent of uber/lyft, needing a ride halfway across Atlanta to their nearest store is not the obstacle it once was.
Enterprise started out in that game but has long since grown and morphed into something a lot closer to Avis, et al, in terms of both emphasis / target market and pricing. Here is one example I’m familiar with:
A friend of mine used to own one of their franchises. The business model was to buy 1- to 2-yo economy cars & low-end family wagons at the auto auction, run them a year to 18 months then sell them on. Generally honest and competent, definitely not glamorous.
There are many, many competitors in this space. Which of them are in greater Atlanta and/or near ATL is something you can research. My advice, ref my first point, is that I would go with a franchise type company, not an AirBnB-equivalent website nor a one-off “Honest Bob’s Used Car Lot and Occasional Car Rental Counter.”
Far worse than crying babies are two adolescents, but they are sufficiently trained now to be good for reasonable lengths of time, even if they snarl at being asked to pick up their socks.
We don’t have any big events so we can go over to Avis and wait forever in another line or even book a hotel for the night in the worst case.
Thank you! I’ll look into that option. Do you know the generic term for this type of franchise?
It looks like that particular one isn’t at the Atlanta airport so I’ll look around.
As for insurance, one option might be to get a credit card that offers primary rental car insurance. Both Chase Sapphires do. We have the Reserve, which is pretty spendy, but offers travel insurance and a $300/year travel credit as well.
It might be worthwhile to find other means of getting from the airport to grandmother’s house or wherever you’ll be staying and then renting the car from a local branch. Airport car rental offices have to charge extra to cover what they have to pay the airports.
Well, since you ask for experiences, here’s mine. When I needed a rental for about a month when I was in between cars, a friend with contacts in the industry arranged for a cheap one-month rental from Enterprise.
The good news: it was a very good rate. I wanted cheap transportation for a month, and I got it.
The bad news: it was a piece of shit old Toyota Yaris. They hadn’t even washed it – the outside was not just dirty, but covered in encrusted dirt. I later washed it myself.
It was strange because my experiences with Enterprise before and after have always been excellent, the cars always new and clean, and they’ll even take you to and from wherever you’re located. It’s saddened me that this month-long experience was such a downer, but hey, I needed cheap transportation, and I got it.
I have some experience with this kind of rental, but it was many years ago and in the US. The only advice I can give is make sure the rental agency knows you will be using it for a month or whatever. The one I tried called me after a month, even though I rented it for two, and wanted me to bring it by for a regular checkup. Since I was 300 miles away at the time, I wasn’t about to drive back just so they could look at the oil dipstick or tire tread depth.
The next time I had this need, I used a local car repair dealer instead. They often have rentals available for much less cost.
That’s an idea. My mom lives in Gainesville, GA which is pretty far from the Atlanta airport. I’ll look into options, though.
I worked in Tokyo for a US company and that company used Enterprise. We always had a good experience with them, but I don’t know if they were taking good care of their regular corporate customer.
Yeah, our credit cards are issued in Taiwan and Japan so I’m not sure if I can get some that covers auto insurance. However, it reminds me that I had a credit card in Japan before that offered travel insurance so I’ll look into that.
I rent cars generally a few times a year (most frequently from Enterprise), and was a member of Zipcar for a couple-few years when it had cars available in my neighborhood. I quit Zipcar when they de-expanded their fleet coverage and left my region, but my experiences with them prior to that were mostly very positive.
I’ve also had generally good experiences with Enterprise, but like all car rental places post-Covid their prices are way up and availability way down, so I don’t rent as often.
I’m pleased to learn about this turo site you mention, which looks like a sort of cross between Zipcar (which combined an overall membership fee with cheap hourly rental rates) and rideshare. I’ll have to check that out.
Well, technically, Wikipedia says “it has opened franchised locations in 41 of the 50 U.S. states,” which is a little deceptive (though probably accurate), as that might be how many places they’ve operated at some point.
@TokyoBayer Never mind, thought the thread was on “car shaming”. I guess I spent to much time on that thread asking whether women were impressed by fancy cars.
I figured that things were all OK, that if it didn’t work out, I’d go with a rental company as that seemed to be a safe alternative. My friend had a good experience with Turo so I thought I would roll the dice.
Unfortunately, I discovered one of the disadvantages of the business model, something I would have avoided if I had listened to @LSLGuy.
The car was there when I got to the airport, all was good for the first several days until the night before we were to set off on a long road trip from Georgia to Saint Louis to visit a cousin, then Wisconsin, to Minnesota and then back to Georgia.
My sister came back and asked about the new oil spots on the driveway. I contacted the owner who come out and tried some sort of oil leak stop fluid which did nothing. There’s no way I was going to go on a long drive like with a car leaking that much oil.
Fortunately, my sister loaned me her SUV and she took the rental. The owner had a mechanic take a look at it the next day. He required repair, which took a couple of days. The owner did have a second car which became a loaner.
It all worked out, but only because my sister is really nice. Had that not been the case, I would have had to cancel the rental and try to find alternatives. Individual owners just don’t have the resources which a rental agency does. I didn’t have any flexibility on my trip days because my cousin was going out of town.
Seems like all’s well that ends well. Your sis saved the day, and the car owner had a loaner.
It’s probably hard to compute how much money you saved vs a conventional rental. Or versus a rent-wreck outfit. Nor how to convert that money saved to hassle avoided.
Some folks and families have a nose for adventure, even adverse adventure. Others not so much.
Based on your experience I’d do turo on a solo trip. My new wife would be aghast & totally stressed out. She’s a name brand girl all the way.
Yeah, the alternative isn’t that bad except if the owner didn’t have a loaner car then it would have taken more scrambling at the last moment.
The problem also is if you are out of the state when something happens, and you need to have a major problem.
Both of those can be solved, but it depends on how much energy it takes to deal with it. For this type of trip, I prefer having more resources to deal with things.
For you herding a spouse and kids unfamiliar with the USA under time constraints and massively jet-lagged I’d totally choose safety over cheap. Ditto for me when traveling with relatively fragile wives past and present.
Yes, minus the spouse holding down the fort in Japan, but yes for time constraints. I had one evening to meet with my cousin hundreds of miles away which burned up any futzing around time.
My friend who had the good experience used it in a side trip somewhere, so the consequencies were much less.