Saturday, June 17, 2006

Review: Advantage Rent-A-Car

When I was searching for a rental car at reasonable prices recently, the Expedia site showed that Advantage Rent-A-Car has quite good prices. So at my last trip to Los Angeles, I decided to give them a try, and I rented a car from them.

The reservation on their website is quite easy, as on most other car rental sites. One advantage: you do not have yet to enter your credit card / payment - so the reservation is just done without any pre-payment or binding contract. I do not know how long they will offer this type of reservation... so use it while still possible!

At the Los Angeles Airport (LAX), the location of the Advantage rental facilities is a bit further away from the terminals, so the shuttle ride takes longer than with other rentals. This results in a more sparse frequency of the shuttle rides which bring the passengers to the car rental. But last time, the Advantage shuttle showed up just after a few minutes. This time, however, I saw many other rental shuttles drive by, but no Advantage shuttle. Only after I gave the rental facilities a phone call (after 30 minutes of wait), the shuttle came after 2 minutes.

The prices are very competitive, and that is worth a little wait: the lowest car category goes for $14 per day, depending on the time of rental and how long ahead the reservation is made. Same day rental reservation goes then up to $20 per day. Also, the duration of the rental seems to matter in a strange way: 4 days rental is the cheapest per-day cost; if kept longer, the daily price for the car goes actually up.

The personnel is very friendly - they even recognised me as I picked up another car a few weeks later. They are a bit pushy regarding insurance - I had to remain very strong about the fact that I do have already insurance, and that my credit card covers LDW.

They do have a nice selection of cars: last time I got a Hyundai Sonata, and this time I drove a Chrysler 300. Next time I intend to get a Charger...

Overall, I really can recommend Advantage Rent-A-Car.

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