Discover Life with your Feet
What is SUP? SUP stands for “stand up paddling” is just another way of surfing the water only you have to stand up and paddle your way around. Even though it looks so easy in the picture it was surprisingly challenging especially the getting on your feet up part. My first time was in a man made lagoon so the water was calm enough to practice.
I have been looking for the cheapest car rental online and just like hotel and air flights, it is not easier. Although I have more experience with finding the best deal for car rentals than the two. I find that priceline or hotwire is not the way to go. Why? because they do not offer the cheapest car rental out there. I still use them though for reference as they can tell me what car rental companies I have to do my research first.
So for MAUI, we want to rent a car for two days only. We will be staying at a condo for the whole week and Maui is not that big compared to Oahu or Big Island that we must have a car for a whole week. Plus, they have bus system that travels you to almost the entire island (mauicounty.gov/bus) for a dollar! So instead of paying a whole week of rental we will save a lot by just renting the last two days.
Priceline and hotwire suggest that Budget has the lowest car rentals for a mid size SUV. I could go for economy or compact but their rate are just about the same as SUV, this is one of those times where it doesn’t make sense how they get their logic for their rates. Sometimes the luxury cars are cheaper to rent than the standard sedan and sometimes a one day shorter of your rental dates would save you a 100 dollars. So you really have to do your research when dealing with car rentals. I went to their site and find their standard rate. True enough you can get it lower than $140 that priceline and hotwire quoted me. Budget gave me the same rate but since they have this “PAY NOW” rate you can get it for $128, a $12 saving. It’s not much but hey it’s a saving. The con is that you will of course pay it now, so the cancellation might be inconvenient if you decided later you don’t want it. It helps if you are sure about your dates so you can play around with the idea. Like in our case, we will be needing a transportation when we land to our condo but a week rental will cost us at least $750. While it is nice to have a car for the whole week it is just way too much. They do have SpeediShuttle (speedishuttle.com) that will take us from the airport to our condo for $37 but you have to reserve it. We can also take a cab but it might cost us around $50. If we rent a car though for just one day when we arrive, it will cost us $140. It’s a no brainer, speedishuttle is the way to go. We will need a car when we leave so I started playing around with the dates, starting from next day we get there till we leave. Here is a list of rates with number of days, take note that when booking you have to arrange the times of pick up and drop off according to your flight schedules. Also this is important, when picking the pick up and drop off hours always put the same as they will charge you per hours rate if you go less or over a 24 hour reservation. Sometime they will give you an allowance of 15 minutes like if you pick it up at 10:00am and return it at 10:15am the next morning, the rate will still be the same but if you make your drop off hour as 10:30am then you can expect to add another $45 to your bill. My advice is always make it the same hours for both pick up and drop off and make it a whole day not half. Okay so here is a list for comparison:
Looking at this list, it will cost us at least $65.35 to have a car for the last two days of our trip in Maui. Compare it to a $750 week rental we will save tons! Given this savings I think we can even afford to rent the jeep wrangler. Sounds great! But wait I have more ways to save.. Forget the bidding war in priceline or even hotwire low rate pricing, My last trick is better, if you have a membership like BJ’s or Costco, or if you belong to an insurance company like Geico, they do have a benefit for their members where they have exclusive discount for certain merchandize or services like car rentals. Just go to their site and look for travel discount code and coupons, here are some site you can go to:
Also, your credit card gives you benefit like this so make sure you check that out too. If you can’t however find any decent coupon or code, try looking at the car rental website and see if they offer any deals.
Or buy those entertainment coupon book, they cost $35.00 though but they include tons of coupons that you can use all year round! We intend to use it for our trip but we don’t have enough time for it to be delivered to our house before we leave so we just signed up for the digital version (entertainment.com). I actually like it better because it’s not exclusive to one state as oppose to the book. I found a coupon for budget but it didn’t work because it excludes Hawaii. Although it didn’t work they still honor entertainment membership so I still got a discount from the standard rate.
Turns out our jeep wrangler 2D rate with the entertainment code for 2 days is $180.87. Not bad! Can’t wait to try it.
Hope this post help you in finding the best deals on car rentals.
I tried Hotwire’s hotel booking the other day. I was curious how it is different from Priceline’s name your own price. I think they offer the same discounts like up to 40% off air flights and up to 50% off hotel.
So far, I like it better. Their program does not require me to bid all day. Instead, they tell me right off the bat how much the price is so all I have to do is accept it. Unlike priceline, after all the time and effort I spent on bidding I still didn’t get any successful bid. By the way, I did try their name your own price for hotel too, but it’s the same. No luck. So i went to Hotwire instead, they do offer lower rates versus the standard rate that appears in kayak.com so it’s a no brainer for me. At first, I didn’t really know how it works. It was a bit confusing, cause all you see is the price for an area not an actual hotel listings. It took me a while to conceptualize the idea they are going for. It’s is kind of similar to priceline when you are bidding for hotel. In priceline, you first pick the area in the map they provide, then you select the hotel star rating you would like to stay, after that they will give you the average pricing for all the hotels with the same star rating in that area. Then you base your bid on the average price they gave you and hope that they will accept it.
In Hotwire, I was already given the price for that area along with the star rating and all I have to do is accept it. Although they tell you the price, they don’t tell you the actual hotel you are staying. Only after you booked it that they will reveal it to you.
Let me tell you after several days of finding reservations it can get really tiring, I am actually at a point right now that I just want to get it over with.. I mean I am only getting started and it’s not like that is all I have to do. I still need to find deals for car rentals, rental properties, excursions.. oh well baby steps!
My motto is to “JUST DO IT!” As long as I am getting something done then I am only moving forward right! lol =D
Okay back to hotwire, I did book one night on an area near the Honolulu airport. Our flight arrives at night around 10:00 pm so I thought maybe just book a cheaper hotel so we can just crash in for the night. In my experience it was a breeze booking in hotwire, it only took me one minute to book the room and I got the hotel I thought I was going to get (Pacific Marina Inn). I got it for $100.00 and the on going rate for that hotel is $119.00. It’s not much of a savings but compared to the resort that we are staying for seven days which is $149.00, I think it’s worth it. What can I say Hawaii is expensive so I’ll take any savings I can get. They will all add up and I know all the research I am doing right now will pay off..
So after I got the confirmation, all I had to do was call up the hotel and ask for a non smoking room and inquire about their complimentary 24 hour airport shuttle and done! Moving on to car rental.. =)
Below is Hotwire’s hotel booking rules and policies and remember to book at your own risk:
Hope that helps and again this is just a disclaimer in case you would like to try it. This post or any of the post written or published under this site – vatuwirifiji.com is not responsible for any damage, misconception of any information that caused you by trying hotwire program, name your own price program and following all the information written on this site. This post is just here only for the purpose of sharing my experience with you.
Thanks and please book at your own risk.
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