usrentacar.co.uk ® Car Hire USA Blog

Hi all,

Just fresh from the U.S. Rent A Car lab’s I’m happy to let you know of our latest bit of geekery….

Here at usrentacar.co.uk we are always keen to speak to our customers either via the phone (0845 226 8523) or via our LiveChat facility

Yesterday we completed the integration of our Live Chat facility directly in to our facebook page www.facebook.com/usrentacar.co.uk. Fans of U.S. Rent A Car can now access this feature directly from our page.

The idea behind the integration is to give our customers another avenue to contact us. Facebook recently hit 1 Billion users so its safe to assume a large number of our customers have facebook profiles, we hope customers will take advantage of this new feature to ask questions they may have forgotten or require confirmation on.

regards,

James

Hi all,

Here at usrentacar.co.uk we are always looking to make car rental simpler, if this means moving a button here or altering some text there then we do it, we are keen to make USA car hire as transparent as possible.

Today we are happy to announce a new partnership between ourselves and ebay owned PayPal to incorporate the very popular PayPal express service.

What is PayPal Express

PayPal express is the integration of the very popular PayPal system directly in to U.S. Rent A Car’s site; this is what PayPal themselves say about it.

People prefer PayPal because they don’t have to enter their card details every time they buy online. By adding Express Checkout to U.S. Rent A Car’s payment options, they are let millions of PayPal customers check out in less than three clicks.

You will see the PayPal express button on our secure payment page (pic below), you will require a PayPal account to take advantage of the express payment facility.

Gavin Boswell Founder of usrentacar.co.uk said;

We are delighted to announce our new partnership with PayPal; we are always looking to work with like minded companies with technology at the core of their business and PayPal are definitely one of them.

Gavin added;

For our customers its that little added bit of speed, security and peace of mind and as usual no additional cost will be added to the customer car rental booking.

The express service is also being integrated in to sister company Orlando Attraction Tickets who recently launched a new logo and tagline.

Here’s to a long a successful partnership.

regards,

James

Hi all,

Ok class, please be seated for today’s lesson; the history of our car hire USA young drivers package.

usrentacar.co.uk launched in 2003 offering low cost USA car hire to UK and European holiday makers but before this in 2002 the founders needed to travel around the U.S. and negotiate deals with the leading car rental suppliers, the problem was they were both 24 years of age! This meant that driving around from meeting to meeting was costing them an additional $25 plus tax per day per driver in young driver fee’s.

Back in the dark ages of 2002 the idea of a young drivers package hadn’t even been dreamt of, it made no difference that neither drivers had 7 years no claims in the UK or that they had no endorsements on their licences.

So during said negotiations the founders spoke to the suppliers about the frustrations of renting as an under 25 driver, most of the suppliers cited statistics that stated most accidents occur by drivers under 25 and how the additional cost for insurances made it imperative for the surcharge to be applied.

However the founders understood this and after speaking with one supplier, Budget Rent A Car managed to organise some rates to cover the young drivers surcharge, although the rates were higher than rates offered to drivers over 24 they represented a significant saving against the local charge. So off the guys went to offer this service to the UK market.

Obviously this proved to be successful and usrentacar.co.uk went on to sell thousands of young driver rentals. With a successful track record in hand usrentacar.co.uk then went on to approach other car rental suppliers and although some were still not interested, 2 more suppliers agreed to give it go.

So usrentacar.co.uk now had 3 suppliers offering young driver packages aged 21-24 thus making this area a lot more competitive.

Alamo Rent A Car offer’s coverage for up to 3 young drivers.

Budget Rent A Car offers coverage for 1 additional driver.

National Car Rental offers coverage for up to 3 young drivers.

The lead driver, regardless of supplier has to be the holder of a major credit card to validate the additional insurance upon arrival but this was a relatively small thing compared to the savings.

In May 2012, usrentacar.co.uk took their commitment to young drives even further by the release of its exclusive Young Drivers Plus product which allowed our young drivers to extend the basic insurance offered to cover the tyres, windscreen and undercarriage of the vehicle, a first within the UK car rental sector.

Today we are still able to offer great young driver packages through our partnership with Alamo Rent A Car and National Car Rental, unfortunately at present Budget Rent A Car have withdrawn their young drivers package, but we hope to renegotiate in the future.

usrentacar.co.uk are always looking at ways to improve the service for drivers under 25 and we welcome your idea’s and comments, please feel free to post below.

regards,

James

Hi all,

Back in April we launched the new look usrentacar website and with it came a whole load of new features including reviews, wait times and our platinum rate. 

The new look has mainly been well received and has recently helped us to our third nominations at the prestigious British Travel Awards (hooray). The one thing that has slightly disappointed us was the speed in which our results were being returned.

If you take for example Orlando International Airport, we are returning 234 separate rental rates (the most in the UK) yesterday this would have taken our site 1 min’s 6 seconds…

More Dwain Chambers than Usain Bolt…

Happily today we’ve bought some new trainers… and the same 234 results are now being returned in just 22 seconds… 

Now all we need is our Olympic medal!?

regards,

James

Hi all,

The usrentacar.co.uk redesign bought with it a lot of new features, most of which I have touched upon in the recent weeks.

One feature I haven’t mentioned yet is the move towards live availability, for many years we’ve had to patiently wait while car hire caught up with the rest of the travel industry by making API’s and XML technology openly accessible to  us.

At present we have live availability with the following suppliers Alamo Rent A Car, Dollar Rent A Car, National Car Rental and Thrifty Rent A Car, this basically means that any vehicle shown on our site with these companies is available to book and will be confirmed immediately, the only time this isn’t the case is when a customer is looking for a one way rental on a specialist vehicle, but our site will make this clear at the time of booking.

So what’s the clock for?

As you will have noticed our site now displays a clock counting down from 15 mins (shown below).

With live availability comes great responsibility (or something like that), as we are directly linked to the suppliers inventory we are in theory blocking all those vehicles from being booked.

Now we obviously can’t do this for an infinite amount of time,  so we have agreed a session time of 15 mins, when your 15 mins is up (as shown by the clock) the vehicles are put back on to open sale and you will be redirected to this page.

We recently added the “research” button which allow you to return to your last search. This way we can keep the content fresh and available to all.

So that’s the reason we have the clock…

regards,

James

Hi all,

Today I’m happy to announce the launch of our new offering for Young Drivers in the USA, we call it the Young Drivers Package Plus…

usrentacar.co.uk has been supporting under 25 drivers since 2003 offering a few ways to save young drivers money while at the same time providing a high level of insurance.

The introduction of our exclusive Young Drivers Package Plus product see’s us extend this commitment to offer the most comprehensive young drivers package in the World!

Director of Communications Frank Williams said

The launch of our Young Drivers Package Plus product is the culmination of months of hard work putting together an offering that we believe shows our commitment to drivers aged 21-24.

What is Young Drivers Package Plus?

Young Drivers Package Plus extends the usual young drivers package from its basic form, CDW, SLI, UMP to also cover some excluded items for example tyres, windscreen and undercarriage of the vehicle.

The additional insurance product is provided by usrentacar.co.uk’s UK insurance partner and is not part of the car rental companies package.

The extended protection is available on most vehicle groups and from almost every car rental location.

Our young driver package is available with our Alamo Rent A Car, National Rent A Car and Budget Rent A Car suppliers. The lead driver of the vehicle must be the holder of a major credit card.

What do you think of our new product?

regards,

James,

Hi all,

Hope you had a great bank holiday and aren’t suffering to much with the back to work blues.

Today we have launched in partnership with Trustpilot an automated system that allows our customer’s to review the service we offer. These reviews are different to the supplier reviews we collect after the hire as ended, as they are specifically about usrentacar.co.uk and not Alamo, Dollar etc.

How it works

7 days after you’ve made your purchase from usrentacar.co.uk you will receive an email from us asking to rank your experience on the trustpilot site via a link.

Simply click on the link provided enter your review and mark us out of 5 stars and that’s it…. all done…

Your personal details are still completely safe with usrentacar and your email will not be shared with mutliple companies.

Why?

We believe that its important to offer as transparent a service as possible which is why we’ve enlisted the help of trustpilot to be the independent gatherer of our performance. All orders will be be given the opportunity to review our service and no reviews will be edited or removed (unless abusive).

Previous customers

We don’t want you to miss out if you feel strongly about our service, you are free to visit our trustpilot page at any time and review us.

All our reviews are also available on our facebook page.

Regards,

James

Hi all,

Both Alamo Rent A Car and Dollar Rent A Car have recently began to offer a popular service that allows customers to select the vehicle they want from their chosen category.

More information can be found here for Alamo and here for Dollar. The service works like this

• Customer goes to the car rental desk and complete’s the rental agreement.
• Instead of being given keys to a specific car, the customer is advised to go to a particular bay.
• Once at the bay the customer can select which ever vehicle they want from it. So if you particularly hate green cars for instance you can make sure you select a different colour or, and this is the biggest benefit, you can select the vehicle that fits your luggage in perfectly.

Until now its been pretty hard to work out which locations and which suppliers offer this service, that is until the usrentacar.co.uk redesign, with our search results we’ve become the first car hire company to specifically pick out these locations and display them clearly on the results page.

As you can see from the image above, all locations and supplier that has the choice product available will be indicated by the choice location button. You don’t have to do anything special or different when booking and the service is free of charge.

Have you taken advantage of the choice product?

regards,

James

Hi all,

Yep thats right! I’m still highlighting new features available on the new look usrentacar.co.uk website today its the turn of our Wait Time feature.

One of the more popular questions asked relates to how quickly our customers will be on the road and heading to their accomidation, we appreciate that you’ve had a long flight and all you want to do is get on the road and avoid queuing.

Last year we launched the usrentacar voucher app, one of the features is our wait time option which allows our app users to confirm in real time how long they have had to wait.

Before the redesign this information was only available to our iPhone and Android users however now this information is displayed on our results page.

As you can see from the image above and circled in green, the average wait time is now displayed for each supplier and targeted specifically for that location.

The example above is for Orlando International Airport where you can see that our customers wait an average of 12 Mins with Alamo, 7 mins with Budget and an amazing 4 mins with Dollar!!

Is queuing time important to you when picking a supplier?

regards,

James

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