The best way I can describe Turo is the “Air Bnb of Cars.”
Turo is a peer-to-peer car rental service. It’s a platform for people to rent their personal cars to other people. It aims to eliminate common hassles of renting a car the traditional way.
You simple create an account with Turo, pick a car, reach out to the owner via the site (or app) and voila! It can be that easy.
You and the car owner agree to a pick up location, you both take “before” pictures of the car (via the app), and then exchange the keys. At the conclusion of the rental, you do the same thing again (meet with owner, take “after” pictures, and exchange keys).
There are multiple benefits that Turo can provide. For one, you have access to a wide variety of cars; many many more than are offered by traditional rental car companies. Want to rent an electric car? a Jeep? a Porsche? You’ll likely find it on Turo. Another benefit of Turo can be the pricing. The price is set by each individual owner, but often you can find options cheaper than you would find at a traditional car rental company.
I want to preface this bad experience with the fact that I have rented with Turo multiple times before (and I will use them again, perhaps just more cautiously).
Prior to this I’ve had nothing but positive things to say about Turo.
This bad experience is also not meant to bash Turo, but rather make you aware of the types of situations you can find yourself in in when using Turo. It’s not the fault of Turo. It’s a risk you take when you use a platform like this.
With all peer-to-peer services (like Air Bnb), the majority of your experience is dependent on the individual owners. You can have really great owners, who go above and beyond and provide exceptional service. Or you can have terrible owners!
I’ve now experienced both when renting from Turo.
One way to [possibly] protect yourself against bad owners is to do your due diligence and choose owners with many positive reviews. This method has worked well for me up until this point…
We decided to use Turo on our first trip with our baby. I was thinking Turo would be more family friendly than using a traditional car company (boy, was I wrong).
Here was our thought process:
I’ve experienced super long lines in the past at traditional car rental companies in the airport. Not only that, you often have to ride a train or bus offsite to get to the car rental lot. With Turo, I figured all the waiting would be eliminated, as we selected airport pick-up and drop-off. This was a huge perk and added convenience, especially since we were traveling with a baby.
In most cases, rental car companies assign you a car. You pick the “class” of car, but more often than not, you don’t get a say in what specific car you get. For our first trip with the baby, knowing exactly what car we were getting gave me peace of mind. I was confident the car would be compatible with our car seat and that the car would be safe (see next point).
With Turo, we could ensure our car was safe. We drive safe cars at home and didn’t want to compromise on this aspect while traveling, (again, especially since we were traveling with our new baby). Not only that, we found that we could get a better car using Turo for a comparable price. It seemed like a no-brainer.
The second we landed, we received a message from the car owner. Instead of them dropping the car off at the airport (what we signed up for), they advised that someone would be picking us up and taking us to the car off-site. Alarm bells started going off in my head. In retrospect, we should have not gone along with this, but we did. I realize this could have ended VERY badly.
We waited a good 15 minutes for this person to arrive. She explained that she was the girlfriend of the car owner and he couldn’t get off work to do the car drop-off like they normally would. She said we would be going to their house about 15 minutes away.
Well that 15 minutes really turned out to be closer to 30. And 30 minutes out of our way, so this really delayed us an hour. This is not counting the time spent waiting for her to pick us up from the airport, the time spent installing, uninstalling, and reinstalling the car seat, and loading, unloading, and reloading our luggage.
At this point it’s clear that using Turo did not save us any time with the car pick-up process. It also made for a more tedious process. I was hoping that using Turo would make traveling with a baby easier, but it was the exact opposite!
To further put things in perspective, it was light outside when we arrived at the airport and pitch black by the finally got to the car we were renting. We had plans to stay at someone’s house and now had to tell them we would be getting in much later than expected.
Besides being a huge waste of time and huge inconvenience, this whole process was very sketchy.
The car drop-off process went much more smoothly, but was far from flawless. We agreed to meet in the cell phone parking lot. To avoid the hassle of uninstalling/reinstalling the car seat and unloading/reloading the luggage, I had my husband drop me and the baby off at the airport first. He then went to the cell phone lot to drop off the car.
The major issue here is that the car owner was late. Once he did arrive, they both took their pictures of the car (part of the Turo requirement), and then the owner dropped my husband off at the airport. This whole process took about 45 minutes.
Luckily, we left ample time at the airport (and have TSA pre-check), otherwise this would have been very stressful.
Despite our experience up to this point, and against my advice, my husband rated the owner well in the Turo App. Why exactly? I have no idea.
Come to find out, the owner rated us well too. Alls well that ends well, right?
Then here comes the shocker. A week or so after the rental my husband gets an e-mail that the owner filed a claim against us with Turo.
We immediately called Turo (and they don’t make this easy…they don’t make their phone number easy to find).
The couldn’t really tell us much at first other than the owner reported damage on their car. Turo was still in the=[] process of reviewing it on their end, as the claim had just been filed.
My husband, who has rented from Turo before always selects to get additional insurance offered by Turo. So I frantically looked up our plan to see what we were covered for and possibly on the hook for.
We had selected the “Standard” insurance, which meant that we would be on the hook for a maximum of $500. Part of me was relieved but part of me was livid because that’s a lot of money for damage that we were sure we did not cause.
At our request, Turo sent us the pictures that the owner submitted as part of their claim. At first glance, I saw immediate red flags:
In terms of the damage, the owner claimed that we scratched the car in multiple places. The owner pointed out several small scratches in their claim. These scratches were in such random spots (like the roof), and appeared to be scratches that you would get from washing/drying a car.
I know for a fact we didn’t scratch their car (we hardly even drove it). But what bothered me the most was the owner’s dishonesty. Even our “before” pictures, which were taken in the dark, showed some of the scratches the owner was claiming we made. Yet their “before” pictures, taken in daylight, clearly were taken before any of the scratches were made. They were using old pictures as their before pictures for Turo and were trying to put them blame on us. Absolutely disgusting.
We pointed out these two issues with the pictures to Turo (the fact that the owner’s pictures were obviously taken at different times than from when we picked up/dropped off the car). This person took down our comments for the case file. We also questioned the amount of time that had passed from when we dropped off the car and the owner filed a claim (and made mention that he gave us a high review and didn’t say anything at the time of drop off). The person from Turo simply said that the owner has 30 days to file a claim.
Finally, we heard back from Turo on the status of the claim. They said that they dismissed the owner’s claim (hallelujah!). They chalked up the “scratches” to normal wear and tear.
We’ve rented from Turo multiple times and the process was flawless, but this experience was less than. We were thinking that Turo would be a better alternative when traveling with kids, but the exact opposite turned out to be true in this case. If you plan on using Turo for a family vacation, proceed with caution!