Here’s something I wish I’d known about six months ago.  Apparently if you’re an American traveling to Europe and need to rent a car you should try to do so on the rental company’s website for that country because it will cost you a lot less to rent the same car.  From a New York Times Travel section article by Michelle Higgins (found via bookofjoe):

FOR a trip to Barcelona, Jorge Cuadros, a lawyer from Alexandria, Va., turned to the Internet to book a rental car. On Hertz.com,
Mr. Cuadros was quoted a price of 626.12 euros for an automatic
Mercedes for five days in October. At $1.42 to the euro, that amounted
to about $890.

Out of curiosity, Mr. Cuadros switched to his native Spanish tongue and checked Hertz’s Spanish Web site, www.hertz.es,
where the same car was offered for 263.92 euros — about 58 percent
less. He had stumbled upon a little-known trick that many online travel
companies would rather keep quiet.

“It seems that the car
rental companies are in some cases even charging twice the price to
residents of the U.S. than to Europeans,” said Mr. Cuadros, who
compares the practice to how some pharmaceutical companies charge more
in the United States than they do overseas. “This is abusive behavior.”

And it’s not just the car rental companies:

In an effort to expand their global reach, online travel agencies
based in the United States like Expedia and Travelocity, as well as
individual airlines and car rental agencies, are creating Web sites
geared to foreign counties. Travelocity, for example, just started Travelocity.com.mx for customers in Mexico. It also has Travelocity.co.uk for Britain; www.Travelocity.de
for Germany; and Travelocity.ca for Canada. Expedia has 13 foreign
sites including Expedia.dk (Denmark), Expedia.it (Italy) and Expedia.fr
(France).

The savings can be considerable. An Expedia.com search for a round-trip flight from Melbourne to Sydney
in August yielded a $350 airfare on Qantas as the lowest available,
including taxes and fees. The same flight was listed on Expedia’s
Australian Web site, Expedia.com.au, for 224.34 Australian dollars, or
about $187 at 1.20 Australian dollars to the U.S. dollar.
Expedia.com.au also listed a lower fare (about 200 Australian dollars)
on Virgin Blue, an Australian low-cost carrier; the United States site
did not search that airline.

So how’s this for a business concept: line up a company offshore that can offer multilingual service, promote discounted rates to American travelers and then have your offshore service book the travel and take a cut of the difference?

For my own sake I think I need to learn at least one other language.