Road Tripping in the USA!

We rented a Chevvy Suburban from Enterprise in North Hollywood/Van Nuys LA in the summer. TBH, after a day I had had enough of it and returned it for a Nissan Sentra that they don't sell in Europe as it was 1/4 of the daily rate and the Suburban was surprisingly boring and cheap and nasty. You start to realise why the USA has hardly any domestic cars, they all seem Hyundai, Kia, Nissan etc... I agree with the OP that LA is generally a ***'hole - decades of socialism - San Francisco too. Avoid!
 
How did you end up in a Suburban when you only needed something the size of a Sentra? Haha. Suburban’s are the biggest SUV you can get over here. I can’t see how it was worse than a Nissan Sentra though...

American cars are generally crap but they’re turning that around somewhat. The new Lincoln Navigator an Aviators look pretty good.
 
timmeh said:
How did you end up in a Suburban when you only needed something the size of a Sentra? Haha. Suburban’s are the biggest SUV you can get over here. I can’t see how it was worse than a Nissan Sentra though...

American cars are generally crap but they’re turning that around somewhat. The new Lincoln Navigator an Aviators look pretty good.
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Was about to say the same. Can understand swapping a Suburban for a CTS or ATS but if you’re happy with a Sentra, may as well just rent one in the first place, they’ve got to be pretty much the lowest class you can rent.
 
geekman said:
Was about to say the same. Can understand swapping a Suburban for a CTS or ATS but if you’re happy with a Sentra, may as well just rent one in the first place, they’ve got to be pretty much the lowest class you can rent.
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I wanted the full USA experience and that included the car and the hat. We were visiting relatives rather than a roadtrip, but Suburban was very expensive at $1200 for 3 days, the Sentra was $227.
For $1200 I expected more.
 
snapdragon69 said:
I wanted the full USA experience and that included the car and the hat. We were visiting relatives rather than a roadtrip, but Suburban was very expensive at $1200 for 3 days, the Sentra was $227.
For $1200 I expected more.
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You got absolutely ripped off for $1200 for 3 days. That is absolutely insane. You should be looking to pay 40-70 quid a day depending on season for one of those. I'd be disappointed in any hire car that cost $400 a day even if it was a Porsche!!!

Why would you even have booked it at that rate?
 
Wow.

Did you google a suburban before you rented it? People get them purely for their size, that’s it. They’re a basic SUV for people who want to carry loads of people and stuff without getting a minivan
 
To add to the above, I've found that a Suburban is often disproportionately more expensive than a Tahoe, for the same experience unless you need to carry a bunch of people + luggage.
 
Sooo we've finally booked to do a West Coast trip in June 2019 - booked flights today and have been planning a route for a couple of weeks.

Flights were *so* much cheaper than I remember them being - managed to get direct Virgin Atlantic flights to San Francisco for £350 each (£330 inc the cashback when it comes in). Flights were just so much more convenient and cheap to SFO rather than LAX. LAX direct Virgin/BA flights were like £730+ and ones with the hassle of different carriers, stop overs, rubbish departure/arrival times and long flight times (14hrs+) etc *started* at £400.

As we're planning on going in a big circle anyway, it doesn't really matter where we start/finish and starting at San Fran comes with the added bonus of only having 12 days car hire rather than 14 days as driving/parking in SF isn't meant to be much fun anyway.
 
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That’s crazy. Virgin wanted $4500 for us 3+infant when we went to the UK in the summer. That was Atlanta to Manchester direct. Ended up flying BA via Philadelphia and it was a complete **** show.

In my experience internal flights in the US rarely run on time and I won’t be booking a non-direct flight again.
 
Well the wife and I are finally going on our honeymoon in September (for a quick tl;dr as it was in an earlier post - we were meant to go last August but had some trouble with her passport that meant we had to postpone it)...

Really looking forward to it :) We're doing:

Flight direct to Vegas for 3 nights, doing Grand Canyon helicopter picnic thing one day, excursion to the hoover dam another, picking up a car at the end (a "Nissan Maxima or equivalent" - thought about a Mustang or something but neither of us are really that into cars so just want something comfy with aircon and space for luggage etc...

Then a 1 night stop in Death Valley, to break up the long drive up to Yosemite (Tioga should be open at that time barring anything crazy), for 3 nights to get in a load of hiking...

Then onto San Fransisco for I think 2 nights, pop to Alcatraz, I've heard cycling across the bridge is also worth doing...

Then down to LA broken up by single night stop-offs in Monterey and Santa Barbara (maybe try to get out on a whale watching boat)...

1 Night in LA, probably try to see the observatory, then an overnight flight to Jamaica for 5 days all inclusive to chill out on the beach with a few cocktails (and hopefully no hurricanes but you never know at that time of year!)

As you can see we're not really that interested in the city-based side of things - as our first time in America we wanted to at least say a few of the iconic cities in passing but I think the highlights of the trip are going to be Death Valley and Yosemite (and Jamaica)
 
uncle_rufus said:
doing Grand Canyon helicopter picnic thing one day,
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Don't do this. Helicopters are not allowed into the grand canyon so they don't go to the proper Canyon.

Also, Vegas is probably the most expensive place to fly too so as you are doing a loop fly into the cheapest place on your route which will probably be LA or San Francisco.
 
We're starting in Vegas and travelling round to LA because we couldn't get any direct flights from Vegas (Edit: or SF) to Jamaica (or we'd possibly have done the route in reverse) - it's not quite a loop either, we chose to leave out the drive between LA and Vegas because it seemed like that would be the least interesting drive...

My understanding with the helicopter thing is just that it lands you somewhere that overlooks the canyon... that's good enough for me tbh
 
It's quite a long way from Vegas to the proper bit of the Canyon, most travel is via plane not helicopter. Check to make sure it's going to the South Rim and not the West Rim.
 
[TW]Fox said:
It's quite a long way from Vegas to the proper bit of the Canyon, most travel is via plane not helicopter. Check to make sure it's going to the South Rim and not the West Rim.
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I'll have a look later, cheers... I didn't see anyone saying they weren't happy in the reviews or mentioning the above so hopefully it should be okay
 
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