Jaunted

Tags: Rental Cars / Cars / Budget Travel / Cheap Travel / Bargains / → All Tags

While Every Other Travel Thing is Cheaper, Rental Cars are Still Super Expensive

Airfares and hotel room prices have fallen markedly in response to the global economic meltdown, but rental car rates are as high as ever, prompting the penny-pinchers over at Budget Travel to offer up a few tips on keeping the costs down on your next trip. In an AP item, the magazine's editor-in-chief said that car rental companies are unique in that they can trim their supply of cars very easily, maintaining a tight market for rentals. Thus, your best bet for a bargain is to book in advance, look for a discount code on a site like best-car-rental-tips.com, or use a bidding site like Priceline.

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Tags: Road Trips / Around The World Travel / Around the World / Dangerous Travel / Cars / → All Tags

The Ultimate Road Trip: AP Art Director Plans Around-the-World Drive

Taking the idea of the road trip to the extreme, an art director from the Associated Press is about to embark on an around-the-world driving adventure. Nicolas Rapp will be departing New York on November 15, 2009 and hopefully returning at around the same time in 2010 after having traversed more than 40 countries on his journey.

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Tags: Niagara Falls / Auto Shows / Cars / Tourism Boards / → All Tags

Niagara Tourism Board Confused, Troubled By Adult-Themed Family-Branded Auto Show

At first the Dream Toys Show & Expo rolling into Niagara Falls on January 30-31 seems like a straightforward car, bike, and boat show. There are vendors and displays where sellers will hawk their wares and exchange pleasantries with customers. There are shows in between to keep people amused, including contests like "Best Muscle," "Best Custom Bike," and "Hot Bikini Contest" ($500 1st place!) There are seminars on tattoos, bike maintenance, car audio, plus a bunch more. There's even a karate contest.

The convention, though, also has a skeezier aspect. In the back of the hall there's a VIP Gentleman's Club that kicks off at 6pm Saturday night. The club, such as it is, includes a burlesque show, a "lingerie show," and live music. It also has pole dancers and a bar. Details are sketchy about the degree to which the lingerie remains intact while the live music is playing, but the overarching concept was enough to raise concerns with the Niagara tourism board.

The entire expo, you see, is also being billed as a family event. There's a bounce house set up. The juxtaposition has engendered in board members what psychologists like to call "cognitive dissonance." Or in Internet terms, they were all like wtf:

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Tags: Animals / National Parks / Cars / Road Trips / → All Tags

Heading To A National Park? Leave Your Bear-Bait Minivan Behind

On your next road trip to one of the country’s national parks you may want to consider taking the Prius rather than the minivan. Scientists have revealed their findings from a recent study, and apparently bears love minivans and SUVs.

In an article published in this month’s Journal of Mammalogy we learn that black bears within Yosemite National Park prefer to steal some human snacks from the insides of larger cars. Researchers looked at data between 2001 and 2007 to see if there were any connections between over 900 car break-ins caused by black bears at the park. Almost half of the vehicles that were broken into were either minivans or SUVs.

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Tags: Rental Cars / Cars / Travel News / Thrifty / → All Tags

Prepare For A PT Cruiser Rental Car Shortage

Time is running out if you’re dreaming to get a Sebring convertible or other Chrysler rental car on your next trip. Dollar and Thrifty announced that they’ve canceled their orders for loads of cars from the American carmaker. In the past, the two rental car companies have ordered almost three quarters of their fleet from Chrysler, but in 2010, only about a third will be coming from the pentastar. The company had an agreement with Chrysler that required a certain amount of order per year, but after Chrysler hit the bankruptcy courts, Dollar and Thrifty were free to go elsewhere.

They will be looking to Ford, General Motors, Nissan, and Kia to fill the parking spaces at airports around the country. For 2010, Dollar and Thrifty will be purchasing about 90,000 vehicles, but only 27,000 of these cars will be coming from Chrysler. In the good old days there would have been a much larger check being written over to Chrysler.

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Tags: Rental Cars / Avis / Cars / Smoking / Travel News / Road Trips / → All Tags

Only A Few Days Left To Light Up In Your Rental Car

Anytime we have rented a car in recent memory, we were reminded early and often not to smoke in the car—even if it was just a PT Cruiser. We’re pretty sure that we had to sign something, and there was always that no smoking sticker right by the lighter where we plugged in our iPod. Apparently, smoking in your rental car is a vacation luxury that we missed out on, and now our time is severely limited.

On October 1, Budget and Avis will become the first two rental car companies to ban smoking in their rental fleet in North America. If you’re caught puffing away, you’ll get nailed with a cleaning fee of up to $250. Too bad they won’t ban fast food in their cars, as we are sick of soda stains in the seats and fries in every nook and cranny of the center console.

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Tags: Midwest Travel / Ohio Travel / Cars / Road Trips / → All Tags

Ohio Joins The E-ZPass Party For Seamless Midwest-To-East Coast Road Trips

Paying tolls on a road trip is a drag, but at least there’s E-ZPass to speed things up. With less time searching for change and waiting in line at the toll booth, there’s more time to stop at awesome roadside tourist traps. Thankfully, Ohio has finally caught up with the rest of the East Coast and Midwest as they are set to join the electronic toll collection network starting October 1.

Effective next week, the entire Ohio Turnpike will be able to take away your hard earned cash thanks to that little E-ZPass gizmo on your windshield. It cost the state $50 million to get everything ready to go if that makes you feel any better—so that’s what, like two weeks of toll collection to recoup the cost?

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Tags: Rental Cars / Animals / Cars / Enterprise / Scary Travel / → All Tags

Forget Snakes In Planes; They're In Our Rental Cars Now

We’ve all received rental cars that had a less than stellar appearance, especially when it comes to the car’s interior. Besides the many lovely odors, stains are the rule rather than the exception. Above all, our favorite is when former drivers have decided to install some type of foodstuff into the upholstery. Thankfully, despite all our rental car troubles, we’ve never received a car with a living critter inside. However, that’s exactly what a Florida woman found when she rented a car from Enterprise Rent-A-Car.

Last week a college student hopped into her rental ride, and immediately hopped right back out. There was a red rat snake just hanging out on the dashboard of the car, and at over a yard in length, it was not a welcome surprise. Luckily, the snake wasn’t poisonous, and the rental car company sent out an animal trapper to capture the stowaway.

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Tags: Driving / Cars / Samoa Travel / → All Tags

Samoa Switches Sides Of The Road For Drivers

As of Monday morning local time, the country of Samoa made quite the change to the way the country moves around. Instead of driving on the right side of the road, they decided to switch things up and drive on the left side. Not since the 1970s has a country shook things up like this, and we’re just glad we didn’t have a visit planned there this week.

To help things go as smoothly as possible, the country is taking a couple days off, as government officials felt that a two-day holiday would ease people into the traffic train wreck. There’s also a three-day ban on the sale of alcoholic beverages, because you know knocking a few back would not help things out at all. So far so good it seems, but that might only be because everyone is still on vacation.

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Tags: Dubai Travel / Travel Safety / Cars / → All Tags

Dubai's Latest Flashy Statement Of Wealth: Designer Seatbelts

Good old flashy Dubai might be one of the world's largest consumers of gold-covered cars, but apparently they think they're too cool for school to use a seatbelt. Thanks to Luxist, we hear that drivers in the United Arab Emirates are so loathe to use seatbelts, that the country is lauching its own aggressive seatbelt safety campaign a la the US and France.

WIth only 11% of Emiratis deigning to strap themselves in, auto accidents in Dubai and Abu Dhabi especially are oftentimes more serious than what should be. As a result, the seatbelt safety campaign wants to appeal to residents' love of luxury and fashion by painting the seatbelt as a statement, as well as safety, item.

How will they do this, you ask? Well, by printing seatbelts with logos of luxury brands, or your favorite team, or the Emirati flag. We imagine a taxi cab picking us up from Dubai's airport, and we climb into a back seat to buckle up with Armani belts. Luxist points out that luxury brands aren't exactly liberal with the use of their intellectual property and might poo-poo use of logos, but we bet that soon you'll able to buy seatbelts in Dubai slathered with the (unofficial) Louis Vuitton Damier pattern nonetheless.

Related Stories:
· Will Dubai Drivers Wear Gucci Seatbelts? [Luxist]
· Dubai Travel Coverage [Jaunted]

[Photo: uncle boatshoes]

Tags: National Rental Car / Car Rental / Cars / Driving / One-Way Road Trip / Passenger complaints / → All Tags

Brits On An American Road Trip: A Dud Car Nightmare

Planning a road trip? HotelChatter contributor London Town is on one from LA to New York at the moment. Some top tips from a week on the road…

If there’s one thing we Europeans know about Americans, it’s that you love your cars. We also know that your customer service is second to none (tell us to have a nice day when we’re over here, and our cold little British hearts will melt all over you).

So we were pretty confident about hiring a car for our road trip in the land of the free. We’ve done it before—we drove from Chicago to Nashville earlier in the year with Avis, and that worked out just fine. This time we were going further, though—LA to New York, to be precise. National came through with the least extortionate one-way fees, so we went with them.

Big mistake. We arrived at LAX late on a Wednesday night, jetlagged and extra cranky as United had managed to mislay our bag for a whole two hours, and at first we were pleasantly surprised at the ease of the pick up service. We literally signed the contract, and were told to choose a car and drive off. We chose a nice red Chevy and headed off. It wasn’t until we reached the interstate that we noticed it kept pulling to the right, trying to drive us off the road.

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Tags: Rental Cars / Cars / Avis / Hertz / → All Tags

Bye Bye, PT Cruiser: Imports Take The Rental Car Crown

Anytime we have to rent a car, we’re pretty certain that our keys will be used to unlock and operate a domestic vehicle, but for the first time ever, car rental companies are actually filling their fleets with more import autos. That means you’ve got a better chance of scoring something from outside the nifty fifty—for better or for worse.

According to numbers released by the trade rag Automotive Fleet, only 48.8 percent of new cars heading to the rental lot came from General Motors, Chrysler, or Ford. We didn’t take too many math classes in college, but we know that means more than 50 percent of rental cars now come from overseas. Hyundai, Kia, Toyota, and Nissan are just some of the new kids on the block—guess that means no more Pontiac G6s for us.

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