I think that generally speaking it is good to regularly review your travel reservations and make sure that everything is in order. Depending on the type of reservation, you may be able to modify it to take advantage of a lower price or cancel and rebook it in a more advantageous way. Recently, I ran into a simple mistake I had made, but the good news is that fixing my mistake actually SAVED me money.
Booking A Rental Car
I had to book a rental car for an upcoming trip I was taking. Normally, I use Autoslash to book and monitor my rental car, and they have saved me a ton of money on several different instances.
(SEE ALSO: Autoslash saves the day again (to the tune of $483.98))
(SEE ALSO: You got a great deal – I’ve been renting these for $100 / DAY!)
I booked a compact car (not a standard car!) for $190.57
Reviewing My Car Rental Reservation
Normally, I submit my reservation to Autoslash and it regularly sends me emails about lower rates that it finds. In this case though, Autoslash was not a lot of help – I think because I was renting from a neighborhood location instead of an airport location. Or maybe I did something wrong? In any case, I never got any emails from Autoslash.
But then, the night before I was supposed to pick up my car, I was double checking my reservation and realized that I HAD MADE IT FOR THE WRONG DATES! I was supposed to pick it up on Tuesday (it was already Monday afternoon) and my reservation was for NEXT Tuesday (i.e. in 8 days)
A Simple Mistake Saved Me $60
I had a bit of a panic attack realizing that it was likely that a next-day reservation was going to be super expensive, and I didn’t really have a lot of other options. But, surprisingly, the reservation was actually quite a bit LESS!
If I wanted to “Pay Now” ( I normally never do but since it was literally for the next day, I considered it), I would save nearly $60 on my 3 day car rental. Now, I have been in situations where being proactive totally screwed me over, so it was nice to have my own incompetence work out in my favor!!!! 😀
(SEE ALSO: I Hate When I Forget To Do This)
The Bottom Line
It pays to regularly review your reservations for changes. There are a number of good reasons to do this, probably most importantly to make sure that you haven’t screwed anything up or that the company (airline, usually) hasn’t changed things that you’ll want to be aware of. But on a recent trip, I was also able to save nearly $60 by fixing my own mistake!
Has making a mistake ever saved you money before? Leave your story in the comments below
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Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
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