usrentacar.co.uk ® Car Hire USA Blog

Hi all,

One of the biggest changes to the new usrentacar.co.uk website is the introduction of a new and exclusive package to our usual offering, we call it…. (drums please) the Platinum rate.

We still offer our silver (inclusive) rate and our gold rate, and nothing has changed with these offerings but times change and since customers have been asking for it, we decided to put together a new rate to cover items not included in the normal USA car hire insurance.

What our rates offer

Silver - 

• Unlimited Mileage.
• Loss Damage Waiver (LDW) which is a combination insurance of both Collision Damage Waiver (CDW) and Theft Waiver. As long as you adhere to the rental policy of the supplier you will not be held responsible for the cost of replacement or repair to your hire vehicle.
• Uninsured Motorist Protection (UMP) up to $1m Liability Cover. Offers an Uninsured/Underinsured/Hit-and-Run Motorist Protection (UMP) that provides the renter and family members travelling together in the rented vehicle with up to $1,000,000 of non-stacked coverage for bodily injury sustained while driving the rental car, and caused by another driver who has no insurance, minimal insurance, or is a hit-and-run driver.
• Supplemental Liability Insurance (SLI) up to $1m Liability Cover. All drivers included on the rental agreement will not be held liable for third party claims for bodily injury or property damage resulting from an accident.
• Basic Roadside Assistance
• All Taxes and Airport Fees.

Gold - 

• Unlimited Mileage.
• Loss Damage Waiver (LDW) which is a combination insurance of both Collision Damage Waiver (CDW) and Theft Waiver. As long as you adhere to the rental policy of the supplier you will not be held responsible for the cost of replacement or repair to your hire vehicle.
• Uninsured Motorist Protection (UMP) up to $1m Liability Cover. Offers an Uninsured/Underinsured/Hit-and-Run Motorist Protection (UMP) that provides the renter and family members travelling together in the rented vehicle with up to $1,000,000 of non-stacked coverage for bodily injury sustained while driving the rental car, and caused by another driver who has no insurance, minimal insurance, or is a hit-and-run driver.
• Supplemental Liability Insurance (SLI) up to $1m Liability Cover. All drivers included on the rental agreement will not be held liable for third party claims for bodily injury or property damage resulting from an accident.
• Basic Roadside Assistance
• All Taxes and Airport Fees.
• Additional Drivers
• First Tank of Fuel

Platinum - 

• Unlimited Mileage.
• Loss Damage Waiver (LDW) which is a combination insurance of both Collision Damage Waiver (CDW) and Theft Waiver. As long as you adhere to the rental policy of the supplier you will not be held responsible for the cost of replacement or repair to your hire vehicle.
• Uninsured Motorist Protection (UMP) up to $1m Liability Cover. Offers an Uninsured/Underinsured/Hit-and-Run Motorist Protection (UMP) that provides the renter and family members travelling together in the rented vehicle with up to $1,000,000 of non-stacked coverage for bodily injury sustained while driving the rental car, and caused by another driver who has no insurance, minimal insurance, or is a hit-and-run driver.
• Supplemental Liability Insurance (SLI) up to $1m Liability Cover. All drivers included on the rental agreement will not be held liable for third party claims for bodily injury or property damage resulting from an accident.
• Basic Roadside Assistance
• All Taxes and Airport Fees.
• Additional Drivers
• First Tank of Fuel
• Physical damage to windscreens, tyres, and undercarriage.
• Towing costs relating to the loss or damage.
• Pay to replace a lost or stolen Rental Vehicle key, including replacement locks and locksmith.

As you can see the Platinum rate now includes cover for windscreens, tyres, and undercarriage plus towing charges and key replacement.

The Platinum rate extra insurance is provided by usrentacar.co.uk and not the supplier. Information on how to make a claim are detailed on the insurance document made available once full payment has been taken.

What do you think of our new package?

regards,

James

Hi all,

Today I’m continuing to highlight some of the great new features available to users of the new usrentacar.co.uk website, yesterday we took a closer look at our car hire usa review engine which offers customer a verified look at how our suppliers perform upon collection.

One of the main overhauls to the website concerned our faq section. We understand that the nature of car rental brings a lot of questions with it and having access to answers makes the whole experience run a lot smoother. Which is why we went back to the drawing board and started again.

Problem

We already had a database of over 200 unique questions asked by our customers which were available online however from customer feedback we found that not everyone was using our old faq engine, we also found that we had no way of pushing people toward the questions we knew were most popular.

Solution

So this is what we’ve come up with.

• The FAQ engine is now accessible directly from the homepage.
• We’ve implemented our own “thumbs up” system which will rank our FAQ’s in order of importance. It works like this; if you’ve had a question that’s been answered via our FAQ system and you’re happy with the answer, give it a thumbs up by clicking on the thumb. The amount of votes a question has dictates where its positioned on our website. The thinking behind it is that the most voted for question will also be the question most people are searching for and therefore will be displayed more prominently on the site.
• We’ve also added a social element to our FAQ’s that not only allow users to comment and perhaps ask further questions but to also book mark the question for future reference.

Feel free to have a good look around our faq section - http://www.usrentacar.co.uk/faqs.aspx and remember to give a “thumbs up” to any question you feel could help new users.

As always I’d love any feedback or comments.

Regards,

James,

Hi all,

Since 2006 usrentacar.co.uk have been asking our customers to provide post rental reviews regarding the suppliers they have just used. We ask our customers to rate car hire companies such as Alamo Rent A Car, Budget Rent A Car and Dollar Rent A Car on car quality, pick up service and value for money.

We displayed these findings on our results page to give customers an idea of the level of service they will receive from each supplier at that specific location. However after talking to customers we discovered that a fair few were unaware that we offered this.

So with the launch of the new website we took the opportunity to create our very own car hire review engine, users can now enter the pick up location they are collecting from plus the supplier they are interested in (or review all suppliers) and the vehicle they are looking to hire (or review all vehicles) and bring back specific reviews verified by usrentacar.co.uk.

Some of the key features displayed in my opinion are

1. Customer review - A great insight in to how our customers have found the service.
2. Make & Model – As you probably know if you’re a regular reader of our blog, none of our suppliers will guarantee make or model of the vehicle you hire, you are booking a category rather than the specific vehicle. However this field allows you to see what past customers have collected which will help you in planning your own luggage and seating requirements.
3. Wait Times – Provided via our iPhone and Android app’s gives you an idea of the average amount of time it takes to collect your vehicle from each supplier.

Feel free to have a search around, remember to give reviews a thumbs up if you’ve found them useful.

regards,

James

Hi all,

The day after the big launch and we’ve finally exhaled! The usual and expected tiny bugs have all but been ironed out (some users may have to delete their cache to take advantage of the new site) and now I have some time to post about some of the new features available starting with the improvements for young drivers.

With the old usrentacar site young drivers had to select the gold rate and then add the young drivers policy to your basket in the additional extra’s section. Although thousands of young drivers actioned this without any problems we’ve been looking for a way to smooth out the process to reduced the fact finding part of USA car hire for under 25′s and I’m pretty sure we’ve done that.

How it works now

It couldn’t be easier, enter your pick up details in to our booking engine on the usrentacar.co.uk homepage, remember to add the age of the young driver as they have to be the lead driver of the vehicle.

Our search results will now only bring back suppliers who offer  the young drivers package*. No adding extra insurances need to be added.

All you have to do then is follow the on screen instructions…

We hope this makes the experience a whole lot easier for our young friends and continue our excellent service to young drivers.

Let us know what you think?

regards,

James,

usrentacar.co.uk

Hi all,

Welcome to the new look usrentacar.co.uk website, we hope you like it; many hours have gone in to making this latest upgrade the very best, our aim was to add the very latest design trends with the very best tech available to us.

We encourage constructive feedback, so if you have anything you’d like to add please feel free to comment below or email me at jamest@usrentacar.co.uk.

Today’s post will simply highlight some of the major new features we’re going to introduce and briefly explain how they work and our thinking behind them.

Homepage

Our homepage has undergone a massive change, although our corporate colours remain the same the look between the sites couldn’t be more different.

The first change occurs in the header (top) where we have embed social book marking options with facebook, twitter and google+. Please feel free to click on them to express you “liking” of the new design.

Below this we have added quick links to log in to your usrentacar account either using your unique usrentacar.co.uk account or via facebook connect. We have also added quick contact detail dynamic drop downs showing our contact telephone number including working hours and contact email addresses.

Also you will notice the return of our live chat facility, this feature has made a comeback purely on the strength of customer feedback, and through our facebook page we discovered this option was a popular feature on previous designs.

We’ve added a large image based gallery where our latest deal and special offers will be displayed more clearly.

In the booking engine we’ve added a new filter which allows you to pick the vehicle type you would like a quote on, previous we returned all vehicles, which some found annoying.

Below the engine we’ve added a new social element showcasing our facebook, twitter, google+ and pinterest account, please feel free to get involved.

Blog

We’ve adde d a new image based blog section, which will display our last 5 posts and allow you to visit them quickly, our blog at present houses over 500 unique posts full of handy USA car hire tips.

Review

usrentacar.co.uk has 10’s of thousands of car rental reviews dating back to 2006, until now these reviews have been buried within our results page, our latest release brings these reviews to the forefront, displaying the last 5 reviews left by our customers either via our usrentacar voucher app or our after care emails.

We’ve also created a stand alone review engine which can be accessed from our homepage so you can view any USA location and read real reviews from real people.

FAQ’s

Car hire in the USA can be confusing if you’ve never done it before, hey it can be confusing even if you’ve done it 20 times. We have a database of over 200 questions and answers which can now be accessed directly from our homepage, however the best part is that you the customer can rank the question you’ve read by clicking on the thumbs up icon, this way the questions that are most important to our users will rank the highest.

The results page

The results page has also been given a massive overhaul, out have gone some of the “bells and whistles” in favour of a simpler, quicker page. You can still filter your results or edit your hire details by using the tab at the top of the page but by removing the side filters we now have the space to offer a more transparent pricing structure, showing exactly what is included in each package, we’ve also decided to rename the packages we offer, settling on Silver, Gold and Platinum.

Taking advantage of the data produced via our iPhone and Android app we’ve added a wait time feature showing the average time our customers have queued to collect their car hire, also within this information column we’ve also added a choice product alert for those suppliers that allow you to select from a range of vehicle instead of having a vehicle allocated.

Sharing your car hire quote has received a revamp, the additional features allow you to post your quote directly to your facebook timeline or twitter feed with a direct link back to your search.

The rest of the site’s functionality is largely unchanged but has received a bit of visual maintenance and bookings can be completed by connecting via facebook.

What do you think of the new design?

Anything we’ve missed?

Regards,

James

Hi all,

Tomorrow should see the long anticipated (by me at least) launch of the new usrentacar.co.uk redesigned website.

It feels like we’ve been working on this for years, in reality its probably about 8 months. We have a ton of new features to launch and even the return of an old favourite!

I think its safe to say the new design will continue our reputation of being at the top of the car hire tree when it comes to social, technology and innovation.

The image above is a snap shot of the new homepage, its only a little teaser but I’d love to know what your first impressions are?

regards,

James

Hi all,

Apologies for the lack of posts recently. I’ve been taking advantage of some holiday time owed by snowboarding in Austria and soaking up the sun in Orlando. Yep life’s been tough…. any way I’m back now and have a lot of posts to come, mostly regarding our eminent launch of the new look usrentacar website, fingers crossed Wednesday could be the launch date.

Back to the subject of today’s post, Grrr stop waking me up usrentacar.co.uk!! An interesting title perhaps but something that’s been bugging a few people who use our award nominated iPhone app.

One of the push notifications the app provides is to ask users to rate the app so others can get a good idea of how it works and if its useful.

Now when we programmed this particular notification we assumed people
would want to review the app while on holiday so we set the notification to activate at 8 am U.S. time. This however was a mistake as if you’re in the UK the notification would hit at around 3 am!!!!

I can confirm today we have fixed this error and would like to apologise to anyone that was rudely awoken by us asking for a review. I know how much I value my own sleep so the new time is now 17:00 UK time.

I hope this now fixes the issue and people can continue to use the app without losing sleep.

regards,

James

Hi all,

Fresh data out today provided from The National Canstar Blue survey, states that 1 in 5 people upgrade their vehicle upon arrival to take advantage of driving a vehicle they would never normally be able to afford.

The survey goes on to state that Men are more likely to upgrade than Women and that drivers classed as generation Y renters are even more likely to upgrade then previous generations.

Rebecca Logan, a manager at Canstar Blue stated

These results show that a sizeable group of car hire customers are happy to invest a bit extra for the luxurious experience of driving and being seen in a car beyond their means in everyday life. This isn’t surprising, given many travellers adopt a more lax mindset when enjoying themselves away from home.

Interesting point, I’m sure we all are little more generous and perhaps even lax with our budgeting when on holiday however  the amazing part about upgrading locally to me, is that in most cases the cost to upgrade is more expensive than it would have been to pre-pay for the vehicle in the UK, in some cases as much as 50% more!

I posted back in April 2011 regarding the choice to upgrade locally or upgrade before you go, I had no idea that so many opted to do this in the U.S.

Remember if you upgrade locally your contract is with the supplier and not usrentacar, we cannot obtain refunds for customers if they have signed locally agreeing to the local terms. Please read everything carefully before signing.

What’s your opinion on upgrading locally?

regards,

James

Hi all,

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts here at usrentacar we are in the process of redesigning our website, the last redesign took place in November 2009 so a fresh look is slightly overdue.

I managed to grab a couple of minutes with usrentacar.co.uk CTO, Karl Hendrie to ask him about the challenges of redesigning the site.

James: Hi Karl, you’ve been talking about redesigning the site for quite a while , can you tell me why its taken so long?

Karl: We aren’t in the habit of rushing in to major re-designs or changing things for the sake of change, in the past year we have quietly tried out different systems and layouts to find something we are not only happy with but also raises the bar.

J: What kind of research did you do when deciding on the way the redesign would go?

K: Our research never really stops, we are always gathering design and tech features. With this redesign we asked existing customers their opinion of any features they would like to see and importantly the features they use already, we are actually bringing back one feature that our customer’s stated they missed.

J: Can you tell me about some of the challenges you have faced with the redesign?

K: The most challenging part for me was deciding what stayed and what didn’t. We had to really sit down and think about what worked on the site and what was really just for show. Some of the tech I was most proud of in the last redesign is being completely removed.

J: What part are you most happy with?

K: I’m very happy with the look of the new site, its a lot cleaner than previous incarnations and has a modern feel. I’m also excited about the potential of embedding a social culture within the site.

J: Thanks for your time Karl, when can we expect to see the new site rolled out.

K: No problem James, I think the new site could be on course for a roll out in the week commencing the 26/03/12.

So some time this week you can expect to see a new style usrentacar site, as always our friends on facebook will be the first to see it (www.facebook.com/usrentacar.co.uk).

regards,

James,

Hi all,

Please excuse today’s slightly self indulgent post but I thought it was a nice story to end the week on, that perhaps some of you might be interested in.

Rebecca  Sloane rented a vehicle with us back in January 2012  for her dream holiday driving around California before heading down route 66, as Rebecca described it.

it was a once in a life time holiday.

All went well with the car rental and she had a lovely holiday. However upon her return to the UK she unpacked her suitcases and searched her belongings to discover she didn’t have her camera!

After retracing her steps mentally she realised she’d probably left it in the rental car. So she gave us a call for some advice.

We advised the following:

1. Contact the supplier’s customer services team.
2. Try to contact the location you dropped the vehicle off at.
3. All else fails give us a call back and we’ll see what we can do…

Generally points 1 or 2 are enough to get to the bottom of the missing item however on rare occasion number 3 is used.

In this case, Rebecca called us back, she wasn’t having any luck with the numbers we’d provided or the numbers she got online. So we decided to give it a go and we sent in our top detectives….;-)

To cut a longish story short, it turned out that the problem was that Rebecca wasn’t the lead driver of the vehicle, her boyfriend was! So when Rebecca called to chase her lost item the supplier was searching under her name and not the driver.

So once this confusion was cleared up, the supplier located her camera and sent it back to her free of charge. So a good result for everyone…

Here is the email Rebecca sent us,

Dear Kelly,

Firstly thank you so much for all your help. Today I received a knock on the door from a UPS man, the package, as I’m sure you know was my camera, in perfect working order.

You can’t put a price on all those memories, so please pass on this email to your manager to express how happy I am with the service you have personally given me, you could of very easily just given me the telephone numbers and left me to it but you didn’t.

Once again thank you very much and I will definitely recommend your company in the future.

Yours sincerely.

Rebecca Sloane

A great result for Rebecca and not a bad one for usrentacar.co.uk Good work Kelly.

regards,

James