Trip to Konxville TN 02

Car Rental from Hotwire
Trip to Knoxville TN

After booking my flight and Hotel together using Expedia, I found out that if I booked car rental separately I would get a cheaper deal for my travel location of Knoxville for the specific time period of early summer. So I decided to do the car rental using Hotwire.

The difference between using services like Travelocity, Orbitz and Expedia as well as car rental companies like Budget, Avis, National, Enterprise and Hotwire is that in Hotwire you have to book and purchase the reservation at the same time. There are no refunds or changes allowed which are routine and easy using other rental outlets. That means if you decide to book using Hotwire that should be your final itinerary and you should be fairly certain that you are NOT going change any plans.

The positive side of this means that you get a good price for the rental. They advertised in the $14 while I was searching for the location and time while other rental agencies that allow for cancellation modifications were advertising in the $20 range. The difference per day was substantial but the purchase had to be final.

Another point with Hotwire is that you won't know which rental agency your car is going to come from. But they will be from one of the big four or five agencies mentioned above. I was happy to accep these conditions and booked using Hotwire.

Trip to Konxville TN 01

Annual Meeting of the American Crystallographic Association
Knoxville, Tennessee

I wanted to travel to Knoxville, TN to attend the Annual Meeting of the American Crystallographic Association at Knoxville Convention Center. Since Knoxville is served via Delta (I always start my searches with Delta, since Tallahassee is well connected via Delta than any other carrier), I tried to look for flights that left late evening and arriving their in before 10 PM (CDT).

I found couple of them and decided to book one of them using Delta's own website. But when I tried to book reservation for my stay and flight, Expedia turned out to give me a better deal for the combination rather than separate reservations. So I went with Expedia.

My flight routing was TLH to ATL and then ATL to TYS. The return journey was simply the reverse of the forward journey. When I tried to combine hotel, car rental, and flight that combination was more expensive. So I decided to do car rental separately.