Oh my word, I sound like a car salesman!
But I'm not.
Speaking of cars (great segue, huh?)
...that is my WFMW post for today. We are traveling to Michigan at Thanksgiving to visit my sister and her hubs. We will be gone 11 glorious days! We needed to rent a vehicle so we didn't have to take the "ghetto cruiser" or "loser cruiser" or what I like to call it the broken down piece of garbage the Ford Windstar. Trust me y'all, this thing is dying a slow, painful, expensive death. You wouldn't want to take it on a trip.
So, I start pricing out rental vans. Not pretty. No sir. The cheapest rate I found was through Budget and it was going to cost us $678!! Yeeeoouch! But we needed the rental and we were just gonna have to bite it.
My darling sister (the one we're visiting) happened to call just before I was going to reserve the van. She asked me if I had ever visited Priceline.com? Who? What? Isn't that the commercials with the guy from Star Trek whose about as old as the stars and calls people 'namby pamby? Just so happens, that's the one. Who knew?
Anyhoo, the rental rate was the same on Priceline. Oh well, no deals.
And then the most amazing thing happened. My sister says to me, 'let's make'em an offer'. What? Offer? Like a garage sale? Yep. And that's what we did. We offered them around $20 less per day off the regular price of the rental.
And do you know what they did?
They took it!!! Woo-hoo!! Our rental van price went from $678 to $470! That's a savings of over $200! See, I can do math!
And they do this with hotels and airfare too! I don't think I can ever take another vacation without checking with Priceline.com first. Of course, my next vacation won't be until 2017, but who's counting. And hopefully, the Star Trek guy won't be their spokesperson anymore. He's just not natural.
And there you have it. Long, drawn out and rambling, but guess what?
It works for me!!
(Thanks to Shannon I am able to share my wealth of knowledge with you. Thanks, Shannon!)
4 comments:
Well done! I really love bargains and hate to pay full price for anything...Enjoy your trip!
I've always had doubts about Star Trek dude, but now we might have to check out Priceline.
Thanks for the tip!
I wish I'd seen this about a month ago. We traveled from Michigan to South Carolina and rented a van, so we didn't have to use our Windstar. (sound Familiar) We used budget and paid $570 for 9 days. Next time I'll try Priceline!
We used priceline last year and had a good experience with hotels. The only problem with priceline is that if there aren't many rooms available, your bid won't be accepted. However, it costs nothing to try, so what is there to lose!
Post a Comment