My experience renting a car on Turo

Today I want to talk about my experience renting a car with a company called Turo. Turo is a marketplace for regular car owners like you and I to rent their vehicles to car renters. It’s sort of like an Airbnb but for cars, The reason I got interested in Turo is because I’m always looking for ways to earn extra income, and one of the things that I like about Turo is that it gives you the opportunity as a car owner to turn a depreciating asset, your car, into something that can potentially produce income.

Check out my video about renting a car from Turo, then read the transcript below if you prefer to read.

Renting a car from Turo

I always like to try a company on the consumer side first to see how it works. The first time I actually tried to rent a car with Turo, I failed. I would say partly my fault though, because I was thinking of Turo as more of an on-demand marketplace. I’m so used to Uber. I need a ride, call it and go. Turo isn’t necessarily on-demand yet.

I needed to rent a car on a Friday for a weekend trip, so I went on their site on Thursday and actually tried to rent a car but it ended up being a huge pain in the ass. I kept trying to book cars that said they were available, and then the owners would get back to me two or three hours later, and say they weren’t even though they had availability listed. Now Turo did have an instant booking option.

I even tried that one time, and that wasn’t instant, so I think that one was a little bit their fault. But this is pretty common for a lot of marketplace sites because when they’re new they might have a lot more owners than customers. Let’s say you’re an owner and you’re only renting your car out for a couple days a week or a couple days a month. You’re probably not gonna be keeping your inventory updated on a day-to-day or even a week-to-week basis. You probably had all these owners who weren’t renting out their car a ton and so it didn’t have great availability.

If you’re looking to rent out a car on Turo, and you’re having problems finding people, or that they’re not having their true availability listed, what I used to do is pick five or ten listings that look good to me and just send the exact same email. “Hey, gonna be in town for these three days, need a car or property, tell me more about it,” and then maybe half the people would get back to me and say, “Oh, my property’s not available.” The other half would say, “Oh, my property is available.”

My successful time actually renting a car from Turo was a much better experience. I searched for a car in a few weeks in advance of my trip and I found this sweet little Volvo convertible and I was actually able to book it no problem.

It was very reasonably priced too, my rental, I think it ended up being $75 a day despite paying for the premium insurance. That’s definitely one thing that you want to keep in mind because normally when I rent a car, I actually decline the insurance and pay with a credit cards that has really good protection.

Be careful about insurance

I’ve specifically called credit card companies and asked if they would cover Turo or similar marketplace owner-to-renter vehicle sites or whatever you want to call them, and they said, “No.” My personal insurance also wouldn’t cover it, so it was a bummer that I had to spend a little bit extra on insurance. It was definitely worth it for that added protection.

I’m sure in the future, they’ll work it out and credit card companies will be okay with it but now since it’s so new, they’re kind of averse to risk. A couple other things to keep in mind when actually making a booking. For multi-day rentals, I saw a lot of owners will actually include drop-off or pick-up for free because that’s the other thing. If you rent from Avis, you have to go to their place. But the nice thing about this, or it could be nice is that since it’s an individual owner, they have to come and get the car to you and if it’s a multi-rent-day rental, they’ll actually most often do it for free.

There are a few options for picking up the car

If you’re only renting for one or two days though, you might have to pay 20, 30, 40 bucks. If you’re looking to rent a car from Turo and you’re flying somewhere, that’s a great opportunity that now you don’t need an Uber because you can actually have the owner meet you at the airport. That’s one of the cool options I noticed on Turo, and that’s what we did Even if they’re charging you with $20 drop-off fee, it might be cheaper or easier or more convenient than you have to take some other needs of transportation, so that was definitely a cool feature. Hopefully these tips are helping you guys because if the thought of kind of renting out your car for money really sounds appealing, I definitely consider a service like Turo and if you ever need to rent a car, the prices are great.

Prices are on par with the big boys

Prices are very comparable, if not cheaper to renting with one of the big boys and I love that they have kind of a diverse selection of cars. I had a friend that used Turo who just went to Hawaii and he rented a Jeep which was super cool. I want to rent a Tesla or something like that next time my birthday rolls round and just cruise around in a Tesla for a day. So definitely a lot of cool stuff. I know Uber man has some experience renting his vehicles on Turo. I interviewed him on my channel about that, he’s got some videos on his channel so if you want to learn a little bit more, you can do that or stay tuned.

We’ve actually got a link to sign up with Turo if you guys are interested, go ahead and check it out. If you’re just interested in vehicle options in general, there’s so many vehicle options these days whether you’re a car renter or whether you’re looking for a RideShare-specific rental, we have a vehicle marketplace.

If you guys enjoy this video, feel free to give me a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel. We release new videos every single week and I’d love to hear from you. So until further notice, take care and drive safe.