Turo — Car rental marketplace

App is great - fees leave you wishing you didn't use it. It was labor day and I needed a car, but car rental companies had no inventory, so I gave turo a try. It was easy to sort cars by type and price. I chose a renter that had a storefront business, and they were great! My mistake was checking out without looking closely at the end price, because the end price was 40% more because of the fees! If you use turo and see companies using their platform, check if they have a website. Book direct!

App has issues. When I was picking up the car, during the check-in process, the app was lagging and said I don't have internet service, uploading pictures was taking extremely long. Biggest issue was when I submitted that I need to return car day early and I had no response, when I arrived to airport I had to call support. it took so long to solve it for them, that I almost missed my flight. And finally when got approved for early return, check out process had same issue with app as at check in.

It sent me an ad as a notification on my phone. I go into the app's settings to disable ads/promotions, only to find that you can either disable in-app text notifications (important), or enable ads by email (not important). Fine, I'll just disable ads using Android's baked-in per-app notification settings. Nop! Only thing I can turn off are "general notifications", which would probably impact text alerts within the app. In short, Turo sends me ads via notifications that I can't turn off.

Although the booking was fine and ultimately went well, I found the app to be extremely "buggy," which is not exactly what you want when you're relying on it for transportation. I was unable to access important features without contacting tech support, who instructed me to clear cache and re-log in a different way. The issue was that the app kicked me over into my browser, which would not authenticate (Android/Firefox).

I tried to make a reservation, and after I had everything arranged and contacted the host, they suddenly canceled it. I spent the whole day trying to resolve it through customer service. They escalated the case and restricted my access without giving me a reason, even though all my documents were in order, my license was recently renewed, and I have Real ID. It's been a nightmare. If you're going to tell me no, at least give me reasons. The customer service agent don't know the reason.