Recently we went to visit our folks in Poland. As our better half is not a flying lover we decided to take a rental car on our way to and from Chicago.
As a person who likes to do thing using fire and forget method i reserved both cars at the time of buying airplane tickets. It was more or less two months before out trip (at the beginning of February. Prices were OK, I made the reservation and forgot about the whole thing.
But… As the trip approached we started to thing if maybe there is something else we would like to get done in Chicago when we were there. On our long list of things we would like to buy for our home there was one particular item that was waving at me for a long time - bed frame from IKEA. Timing seemed great, frame was in stock and the IKEA itself is more or less on our way back from the airport. The only problem was a car - we needed quite a big one - frame was packet in a box over 60 inches long and 30 inches wide.
So I went to budget.com to try to change our reservation from midsize sedan to mini van or big SUV. To my disappointment they were sold out. But something else caught my attention - it was a rental price - it dropped down almost 20% for midsize car! More - the same price was for fullsize. Not thinking long I changed my reservation to a fullsize thinking that maybe I’ll be able to upgrade it at the pickup location manually.
I also made a mental note that maybe it’s worth to recheck it again just a day before our return. And so I do. To my greater surprise price went down again! And again the saving was quite substantial - at the end the price for a fullsize car was almost half of the original one for the midsize. The way marketing people work at budget.com is a great mystery for me. One would thing that early reservations should be the cheapest. More - if I already selected and accepted higher price the system should block it and do not offer me a lower one even if prices at the company dropped. Anyway - I’m pleased with results so don’t change Budget!
P.S. Of course Budget’s location at O’Hare airport is so busy and (not to offend anyone) so positively unorganized that our (prepared for us) fullsize car already disappeared from the lot. As usual we were offered to pick up any car we liked within the same parking area (same price range). And there it was - nice blue Ford Explorer - perfect for our transportation needs. This way we saved a lot of money - both on rental itself and eventual shipping of the bed frame - and time doing everything on our way back from Poland.
