Automotive, Finance, Home Improvement, and Travel.....in the Same Web Site?
Written: Sep 17 '04 (Updated May 10 '05)
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Shopping for a car or an automotive product? Thinking about remodeling a room(s) in your house? Do you need to rent a car or reserve a night in a hotel? Want to buy some insurance? If any of these things holds true, then you might want to consider using the internet, where buying cars, insurance, extended warranties, hotel stays, and other products is fairly simple and easy to accomplish. There are many sites to help you find what you want, and there seems to be a wide disparity and in quality and usability of these sites. One site that I have used a few times but don’t surf around in much anymore is the subject of this review. It’s Pricequotes.com, a site designed to help you fulfill your automotive/travel/financial needs.
What Does This Service Offer?:
Pricequotes.com can be utilized for finding the following:
New/Used Cars- If you’re in the market for a car, pricequotes.com will hook you up with a local dealer or private seller to help you get the vehicle you’re looking for. It will also helps owners sell their used cars.
Warranties- Extended service agreements can be purchased here, to protect your vehicle against mechanical breakdowns.
Car/Life Insurance- Auto insurance coverage can be purchased through this link in the site.
Home Improvements- Whether it’s a new bathroom, flooring, kitchen, roofing, a new sunroom, or other area of improvement, pricequotes.com will hook you up with a contractor to help you reach your goal of a nicer home.
Hotels- Overnight stays in your favorite cities and your favorite places of lodging can be purchased through this link.
Car Rentals- If you need a means of transportation after you book your hotel, you can click here to reserve a car.
Mortgages- New home mortgages and refinancing can be transacted through this part of the site.
Payment Methods/Shipping Charges:
Making payments varies based on the area where you are making a purchase. The links for hotel and car rentals accept credit cards for payment, while cars and home improvement pay methods are decided based on the company that contacts you. And, of course, insurance and warranty purchases are generally paid for in cash. But again, it depends on the company you decide to purchase from.
Customer Service:
To reach customer service with a question or problem with the site, you must logon to pricequotes.com and then click into the “contact us” link. Here, you will be given a text box where you can type your message and then wait for an e-mail reply. You cannot call pricequotes.com. This e-mail response is the only means of contact.
Final Thoughts:
I spend a good deal of time on the internet looking for great shopping deals and I’m always ready and willing to try out a brand new site. When I heard about pricequotes.com for the first time last year, it was due to the fact that it included hotel and car rental reservations. I logged on hoping to find some great prices on these items and to see what else the site had to offer. I was disappointed on all fronts.
The main reason for my disappointment is because there is one major strike against this site: it is nothing more than an affiliate link for other web services. If you want to buy an extended warranty on your car, you will be asked to choose between warrantydirect.com and 1sourceautowarranty.com. If you want to reserve a hotel room, you will be asked to choose between hoteldiscounts.com and onetravel.com. If you want a new mortgage, the choices are USA Lenders, Loan Web, and Loan 123. The other areas work the same way. Now, it is true that the car purchasing function attempts to look for the best deals among many different sites. But even then, it is still just an affiliate link. And when you enter your information in this area (or the home improvement area) you will be asked to enter contact information for a future response. Pricequotes.com sends you data to car dealers or home contractors (which ever the case may be) based on who has what you’re looking for. Once a match is found, you will be contacted by a salesperson.
If being a glorified affiliate site wasn’t bad enough, there are many other reasons to dislike this site. Most importantly, pricequotes.com doesn’t offer a good selection and it doesn’t offer good prices. I used the hotel reservation service when I first logged into this site and I was disappointed right away by the fact that there were only two affiliates to choose from- common sites that I could have logged into directly. Worse yet, the hotel selections were abysmal. I could have logged into many other hotel lodging sites and found a much larger array of hotels and resorts to choose from.
I have visited other crummy web sites before, and many of them were comprised of affiliate links just like pricequotes.com. I was able to forgive the site for its lack of selection, poor layout, slow page loads, etc., if the prices were low. But with pricequotes.com, the prices are no better than what I could find by using other web sites. I was able to locate the same hotel rooms, quickly and painlessly, through other web sites for less money. And other sites are arranged more sensibly, adding yet another strike against pricequotes.com.
One other thing that I find interesting about this site is its choice of products for sale. It makes sense that pricequotes.com would include extended warranties along with the new cars, used, cars, and auto insurance. But where did they get the idea to add hotels, car rentals, mortgages, and life insurance into the product mix? Whose crazy idea was that? Why not also offer airline tickets, to round out the travel category and brokerage services to complete the financial category? What person thought of this unusual mixture of product offerings?
So there you have it folks: a web site that is comprised of affiliate links, with a weak selection and high prices on products. In most every instance, you will find better deals if you shop someplace else, making pricequotes.com a total loser in the world of web site services. The strikes against this site added up quickly, and it had already struck out within minutes after I logged in for the first time.
Don’t waste your time with this web site “affiliate middleman”. Log into the sites directly, and you will save yourself time, money, and headaches.
Be Sure to Click on the Links Below to Read More Reviews on Related Web Sites:
Cars Direct.com
Autoweb.com
Invoice Dealers.com
Discount Tire Direct.com
Car Prices.com
Carmax.com
Cars.com
Autonation.com
Recommended:
No
What product did you purchase or try to purchase? Hotel stay
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