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When we traveled to Portland, Oregon, we knew we wanted to discover some of the hikes that were outside of the city center. While many of the trails on the Portland side were closed due to the recent fires, the trails on the Washington side across the Columbia River Gorge are for the taking. This required approximately an hour drive from Portland, so we knew we wanted a car. Turo is a car rental company that saved us $$ on our trip!
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Typically, we would go to a car rental website to book a car for our trip. Mike gets a 25% discount from work but even with the discount, the car that we would have booked for our four day trip in Oregon was estimated to cost about $200. If we used credit card rewards points to book a car, it would have cost us a little over 6,000 points per day, adding up to a total of over 24,000 points, a value that is WAY too high. So Mike mentioned the alternative of using Turo.
Prior to this trip, I have never heard of Turo. It is similar to AirBNB, wherein car owners opt to rent out their cars. Together, a pick-up location is decided upon, and you pay a price per day. Our car was $15 per day, which is super cheap! Basic protection (which is an insurance protection through Turo) cost us $9, a delivery fee cost $15, and a trip fee which is retained by Turo cost $8.15. The trip fee goes to Turo for maintaining the site, for their 24/7 customer service, etc. Also, the owner may charge a clean-up fee, just like with AirBNB. For our particular car, if we had returned the car dirty, we would have been charged a $50 fee. Since we returned it in decent shape with the gas tank full, we were not charged any additional fees. For all four days, the car cost us $92.15. That is more than a 50% savings rate than if we had gone with a car rental company that already had a 25% discount! The money we saved was re-allocated to eating at Pokpok, Salt & Straw, LucLac, and Bollywood Theatre. I’d consider that a score!
Our first experience with Turo was quite pleasant. The owner of the vehicle was very responsive and easy to reach. He had the car waiting at the airport parking lot, ready for us to go. We never met him in person, but that was totally fine with us. He had the keys hidden somewhere near the vehicle and he simply gave us the location. The car was very clean and functioned well. You can choose any car you want on Turo, but it will affect the price. Ours was a Toyota Corolla 2014. It was everything we needed in order to get around the city and to the hike trailheads. When we had picked up the car, the owner had uploaded photos of the car to show what condition it was when we got it. Likewise, when we dropped off the car at the airport on our last day, we were also able to upload pictures of the car the way we left it. We left the keys where we were instructed, parked the car in an agreed upon spot, and boarded our flight! There were no hitches in our trip plans.
I would highly recommend people to try Turo. I cannot believe that I have never heard of it before, but as an AirBNB fan, it is obvious that I would also be a fan of this as well. I mean, $15 a day is a hard price to beat! Check out Turo today using Mike’s referral code and get $25 off on your first trip to see how you like it!
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