A Quote Against a Price

The difference in one line

A price applies to a category. A quote applies to your dates, your car and the answers a lot gave this week.

Why a price cannot be right

A published daily figure has to cover every case, so it covers the easiest one. It assumes the ordinary length of car, ordinary dates, nothing on the roof, a return on the day stated, and no month in which ground behaves differently.

Change any one of those and the number moves. That is not a trick; it is arithmetic. What makes it feel like a trick is discovering it at a gate rather than in a document.

What this counter prints instead

One range, not one number. The rates page carries a daily range for open ground and a daily range for covered ground, because that is the truthful shape of what several lots quote in one city. A single number would be tidier and would be a smaller version of the same problem.

Every addition, with whose charge it is. Sorted that way rather than alphabetically, because the distinction between what this counter can waive and what it cannot is the only one that matters when something changes.

The slip rate, always, before you travel.

Where a range comes from

Several lots, asked the same questions in the same week, answering differently. The bottom of a range usually belongs to open ground on the longer runs of dates; the top usually belongs to covered ground on short ones. The range is not a negotiating position and there is nothing to haggle over: it is the spread of what came back.

The word this site avoids

It does not print a daily rate as though one number covered the city. It prints ranges, and each quote narrows the range to your case with the dates and the car on it. Where the phrase appears on this site it appears attached to a lot and a set of dates, never on its own.

The honest limit

A quote is still not a price you will pay, because the lot takes the money and the lot's terms govern. What a quote gives you is the number written down beforehand, the additions named, and the questions that failed listed. In this trade that is a meaningful step up from a figure on a page, and it is as far as anybody can honestly take you.