Hotwire Price Alerts Are (at best) Only Marketing

Hurray! At the end of the month I get to go to Winnipeg! But I needed a reasonably priced car rental. One of the places I normally shop is hotwire.com which has a “price drop alert” and will email you when prices drop. Since it was $51 for the smallest of small cars – that’s what I did. Sorry, Winnipeg but at the end of October there isn’t a massive wave of tourists wanting to come to Portage & Main to pay that much for a one-day rental…

In total, hotwire sent me six price drop alerts for around $39. On one of them I clicked through to book that within 30 seconds of the email alert receipt. Nope…the least expensive one was still $51…and didn’t change the entire two weeks of looking.

So it’s pretty obvious that the hotwire alerts are somewhere between useless and simply marketing to give them an excuse to email you. For the entire two weeks, priceline.com was $5 cheaper anyway and today (October 13th) their price for the same compact car on the same day was $29 versus the hotwire $48.

Sad but true: Skip hotwire on car rentals and on any so-called price alerts. I’m going to miss them because I’ve dealt with them quite a bit over the past number of years. And, sadly, their media relations department chose not to reply to my inquiries for comment.

George Boelcke – Money Tools & Rules book – yourmoneybook.com

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