National's Emerald Choice for Minivan worked beautifully!

[musical2]

I just wanted to relate my experience with National's Emerald Choice at the Airport (MCO). This was my first experience with National and I was a bit wary of what to expect, but it worked great. First I made my reservations over the web looking for regional specials and found that Florida Orlando was advertising a Minivan for $209 plus the usual taxes and fees. Once I arrived at the airport in Orlando, we just picked up our luggage and went to the Minivan aisle and picked out an Oldsmobile Sillouette, packed our luggage in it and drove out to the gate and was out of the airport in less than a half hour from touchdown. Excellent!! We drove around for the week with no problems, came back to the airport and dropped off the van. We didn't have to put gas in the van. They just charged us $1.50 per gallon for what we used and we were off the ticket counter to check our luggage.

All-in-all, National's Emerald Choice for a minivan was definitely a painless experience. I'll definitely to with them again.

Bart

 

[TommyJoe]

Glad to hear National worked out so well for you. We hope to get a deal like that also when we do DCL/WDW this Oct./Nov. A few questions for you. Did you just get lucky in finding a minivan available in the Emerald Aisle, or were you somehow able to reserve one? Did you have to use a special code to get that rate? Did you use National provided child car seats and if so were they good quality? Any thoughts you can share would be much appreciated.

 

[musical2]

TommyJoe,

This was not an Emerald Aisle reservation. It was an Emerald Choice reservation since I reserved a minivan using the regional specials for Florida on their website that was good until September 30, 2001. They advertised $209 for a minivan and I jumped on it. I originally had a reservation with Dollar, but they couldn't guarantee that I would get a grand caravan so I jumped on the National regional special for the minivan. We needed the extra space in back of the minivan that GM and Ford Minivans have, but only the Grand Caravan has from Dollar. The regular Caravan minivan doesn't have the necessary luggage space for our family. National had three types of minivans available on the Emerald Choice aisle, the Chevy Astro (which I don't like), the Dodge Grand Caravan, and the Oldsmobile Silouette (which we got). We chose that one because it had sliding doors on both sides of the van and the rear luggage space was good.

We brought our own carseats so we didn't use the ones from National.

Bart