Since this is a popular subject a while back, despite it is late for this year, I thought I would share our experiences here so in the future when someone wants to go, a search here can find the info that might be helpful. Instead of writing a journal, I would put down items by subject so it is more organized and easier for others to get info.
Air :
We arrived Jacksonhole around noon on Sept 21 (from DFW) and departed Jacksonhole around noon on Sept 25. We used American Airlines award tickets for an extended 25 day trip - this 25K miles domestic award ticket (the "cheapest" that allows one fly between lower 48 and Canada, including Alaska with one Open-Jaw and one Stopover allowance) let us fly from MIA to ANC (via DFW) to start our 7-day Alaska South Bound Cruise that ended in Vancouver. After staying 10 days in Vancouver (visiting Vancouver Island and Pacific Rim National Park, as well as Fraser Valley) we flew down to DFW on Sept 20, overnighted at DFW and then flew back up to JAC on Sept 21 morning. It is a backward travel but it is the only way AA would fly us from Vancouver to Jacksonhole. The inconvenience is overnighting at DFW. The upshot is we only paid $35 tax per person for the tickets (The CSR even made sure we did not get double-charged tax in/out DFW for the leg between YVR and JAC). A paid ticket would have costed us $900 to $1200 per person for this itinerary. Thumbs up to AA. Also I sincerely urge everyone to get on airline / hotel loyalty programs - It Pay Off. I am more than happy to offer pointers in case anyone wants to know more.
Weather :
On our day of arrival it rained very hard. During our 4 day visit, only the 2nd day (largely outside park on the east side) and morning part of the 3rd day it was good weather. Weather rapidly deteriated past noon on our 3rd day. We encountered rain that turned into snow. It had hail storm shortly after midnight and in the early morning on our 4th day, and caused damage on our rental car. It again rained hard during daytime on our 4th day till late afternoon. Consequently we had no idea our rental car had sustained hail damage until the sun came out in late afternoon when we were already in Jacksonhole then we saw all those dents on the hood and on the roof. On the day we flew out, we finally got to see the lower portion of Grand Teton and by the time we were ready to board our plane, a tiny corner of the peak.
Car :
We reserved an intermediate size car with Thrifty. It took forever to get our rental car at the airport counter - the line was long and the process was slow - there was only one agent working. We saw neighboring counter Avis ran out of cars and their customers went to line up at Thrifty counter. The guy before us had a party of 4, they wanted an SUV but they did not have reservation. Thrifty ran out of SUV and the agent offered them a van instead. We ended up with a Ford Taurus, supposedly an upgrade from Dodge Stratus. Our experience is, you dont need an SUV - we have seen some old crankers still be able to navigate the road fairly well - however, you do want to make reservation, and more importantly, consider buying the physical damage waiver insurance. We did not think about that at the time - we had extensive driving experience in various road conditions, including gravel roads and severe weather conditions and we were very careful in parking etc. We never had any problem in our previous numerous rentals (in this trip alone we rented car 5 different occasions, for example). We always rented with a credit card that provided coverage anyway ... so naturally we declined the waiver which is $18.99 a day we later found out when we returned the car and had to file a damage report - for $80 we could have avoided the hassle ... It never occurred to us something like hail storm could happen and there is absolutely, positively nothing you can do unless you have covered parking and of course it is impossible in the park or anywhere in surrounding towns. I will detail the process of preparing the damage report and filing insurance claim with credit card at the end of this post.
Road conditions :
Generally pretty good, except those one-way side roads that lead to interesting points. The section between Chittendon Road and Canyon Village is finished ahead of schedule, with nice, smooth, new asphalt surface. That section is extremely winding and narrow, speed limit is 20mph but there are a few pullouts to let slow cars to pull over. The section from Chittendon Road to Tower Fall (North) is in need for some repairs - our guess is they may start that next summer.
Beartooth Hwy from Cooke City is under construction - the small section from Cooke City to Junction 296 - Chief Joseph Scenic Hwy - is opened with 30 minutes delay - cars move in one direction led by a pilot car. On our 3rd day after heavy rain, that section was closed. We went thru it on our 2nd day and drove the full length of Chief Joseph Scenic Hwy down South to Cody. Then from Cody we headed back inside Park via East Entrance. East Entrance is going thru heavy construction. Long stretch of sections of gravel surface or no surface (mud), led by pilot car going one direction at a time. There were sections that were two-way but road surface remains gravel mixed with mud. Supposedly all these would be done by mid Summer 2006.
Signpostings are generally good at main road junctions, but not very clear and way too small on service roads once you turn into the areas such as Old Faithful, Lake Village, etc. We wish they have light reflected signs for those areas. It is quite difficult to find your way inside the service areas after dark due to the many one-way, no entry signs and direction signs are all very small, situated low near ground, without lighting. Our 2nd night was booked at Old Faithful Lodge. We knew exactly where it was as we were there the day before. However when we arrived at 8:30pm we were unable to find the road at the vast parking lots that led to the lodge. We had to go to the only lighted building which turned out to be Old Faithful Snow Lodge to ask for direction. The guy at front desk told us the lodge we needed to go was just about 200 yd on our left, but we had to take a big round circle to get there ... and he shown us a map ... What a pain.
Lodging :
We stayed at different place each night : West Yellowstone, Old Faithful Lodge, Gardiner (North Entrance) and Jacksonhole. Our conclusion is we prefer to stay OUTSIDE park - for the same or less cost, one gets much more room, amenities, and only small inconvenience. On everynight outside park we had a 2 queenbed room with nice bathroom, coffee-maker, microwave and fridge. 2 of the 3 nights there were continental breakfast. On top of that I earned 750 AA miles for each stay due to regular and bonus miles. The night we stayed at Old Faithful Lodge, the room is tiny, the bed is a small doublebed and the bath is a small shower with a washing basin in the room. We slept poorly on that tiny bed. Bad decision of my part.
Scenaries and Highlights :
We like West Thumb due to its small size to walk thru and the unique geysers that erupt from the lake. We only walked the short geyser hill loop at Old Faithful area as the Grand Geyser and the Castle Geyser have a vastly apart eruption prediction time - 1.50pm + - 90 min and 5.00pm + - 60 min respectively - dont have enough time to spend waiting. Grand and Castle are much grander than Old Faithful when they erupt but the 3 hours in total waiting time just not something we would do.
Midway Geyser Basin and Lower Geyser Basin turned out to be much more interesting. We wish we stop at Grand Prismatic Spring at Midway Geyser Basin when we drove towards north on the evening of our first day as weather was ok at the time. We wound up visiting it on our 3rd day in heavy rain so it was not possible to take good video. The hot spring is the largest in the park and the steam is of light blue color, very pretty. But what we lost our opportunity at Grand Prismatic Spring was more than compensated for when we encountered an unexpected sunset at Great Fountain Geyser ready to erupt when we detoured from the main road and drove the one-way North Firehold Lake Drive. I strongly recommend the 2 one-way drives between Madison and Old Faithful. If you are as lucky as we have been, you would see the most beautiful sunset with gold ray shining on an overflowing Great Fountain Geyser which would overflow 75 to 115 minutes before eruption. When we passed by at around 7:15pm we caught the sunset and had taken some gorgeous video. A geyser just to the right also erupted very high while we were waiting like others for this one to erupt (the prediction was between 7:25 and 8:30 and it came at almost 8pm when the last daylight was about gone) It was one of the highlight of the trip. When you go, better check with Visitor Center for the eruption prediction for this geyser. When we passed it again 2 days later, the eruption time was predicted at 9pm and then 1am for the following day, and the area was drying up. We just had dumb luck to catch such breath-taking sunset. We did the Southbound one-way Firehole Canyon Drive (just south of Madison junction) on our 4th day. It was a very scenic drive along the canyon with waterfall and a swimming hole - Yes, they make a section of the lake (more like a stream to me) available for swimming as the water is warm yearlong. In other sections of the lake on the north-bound one-way drive, the water is actually steaming !
The best scenaries of the whole trip were the drive of Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, AND Chief Joseph Scenic Hwy OUTSIDE PARK. We were lucky when we did this long loop (total 277 miles) on our 2nd day, the weather was very good. We started at West Yellowstone around 9am, went thru Madison, to Norris (without stopping as we planned to do our stop the following day), to Grand Canyon of YS, where we spent quite some time to walk the trails at both Lower Fall and Upper Fall, then went North to Tower Junction (walked the Tower Fall also) and then headed East to NorthEast Entrance. Waited 30 minutes at Cooke City before we were piloted to US 212 then we headed South on 296. The view is incredible - wide-open mountain range with valleys and big sky on winding mountain road - This is THE BEST VIEW, the most scenic 44 miles in our whole trip. From 296 we changed to Route 120 and 16 miles south we were in Cody. Cody is a nice town with a rich history. There is a grand scale history center dedicated to Buffalo Bill. There is a Super WalMart on the way out of Cody towards East Entrance. We stocked up our fruits, vegie and other food items there. Once outside park you can drive close to 60mph, so it helps.
Norris Basin - we did some short trails to see the colorful geysers and mud pools. One can get a grand view just at the top of the basin - that is probably the 5 minutes most tour buses spent here. However, you wouldn't get to see the various colored geysers and puffing mud pools in the colors of Cafe Latte, or more weird, blue or yellow unless you take the boardwalk trails.
We did not like Mommoth mainly due to the dried up Terrace Spring. Lake Village is not impressed either. We much prefer West Thumb than Yellowstone Lake. Grant Village Visitor Center is worth a visit. This is the only visitor center we stopped by. It has display of the history of the Park, the 1988 big fire which burnt 1 million acres of the 2.5 million acres of Park land.
Animals :
Bisons are everywhere. I got scared when they just sat next to the boardwalk at Geyser Hill Loop at Old Faithful. I walked quickly and ginerly in front of them - they are no more than 2 feet away ... They also can be annoying when they walk in the middle of the road and block the traffic for a long time.
We encountered our first Elk at West Thumb. First a lone female, then a small group, about 4 or 5 female and a mid-size bull. Then we saw a playful cyote. We had some nice video clip of him playing with a tree branch.
We had 3 great encounters with animals.
First one was a grizzly rambling at roadside on the riverbank, on Hwy 14, about 5 or 6 miles before East Entrance. It is not a big grizzly though, my guess is it is probably only 3 to 4 years old, just left its mother for a year. (Grizzlies stay with their mother for at least 2 years, 1 yearling and 2 yearling ...). It is very close to the guardrail playing in the bushes. We had caught him on video turned up his head and facing us for a few seconds.
Second one was a HUGE group of Elks we saw at Mommoth Spring (the town). At first we saw a big bull sitting right at the lawn next to the road thru town. He is agreesive, barking very often. By the way, we heard Elk bulls barking all thru the park even when we dont see them. Some people may confuse the sound with Wolf. I strongly doubt one can hear wolf as there are less than 40 wolves in the vastness of the park. Anyway, then we saw 2 more bulls sitting on another lawn, also barking from time to time. Finally when we walked closer, we saw a herd, may be 20 to 30 females at the hillside lawn and a Big Bull walking down the hill towards the herd. The herd was so large that the town had several volunteers out to direct people and traffic as Elks can be dangerous. The herd stayed there till very late at night when we passed thru again around 9pm and they were virtually everywhere. We had to stop to let a female walked pass in front of our car.
Third one was a black bear we saw at the roadside woods just before we got to Lamar Valley at about 7pm. The guy was looking for foods, digging dirts and rumbling thru bushes. We took a good video of him with all the actions. This encounter made our double-back 60 miles drive from North Entrance to Lamar Valley at the dusk wellworth it.
Insurance Claim :
We rented our car with Platinum Mastercard which provided secondary rental car insurance for physical damage, including out-of-fleet downtime. Since our own car insurance carries liability only, the MC insurance becomes primary. Not all credit cards have rental car insurance, and not all insurance coverages are the same. For example, Visa Signature only covers collison damage insurance and no downtime coverage. It would not help us if we have used a Visa as the damage we have is not from collison but from hail storm.
Once we discovered the damage, we called our card company (Citicard) and they told us to call MC Assist. It was on Saturday evening. MC Assist phone rep said Insurance Claim Dept only work M to F 8 to 8, but she told me what documentations we would need to gather : Rental Car Contract, Repair Estimate, Police Report. So we went to look for police station at Jacksonhole and explained to them we needed a police report for insurance purpose eventhough there is no crime committed. They were nice enough to let a constable taking care of us and took the info, issued a case number, the report would have to get approval from a sergent and then it would be mailed to us.
We spent the morning of our departure day cutting color dots to identify the various sizes dents - nickel, dime and just noticeable, and we videoed the car. We then made a statement describing the damage - where and when that happened and the description of the damages - how many are nickel size, how many are dime size, depth ranging from 1/16 inch to 1/32 inch, and how many are just noticeable, on the hood and on the roof.
When we got to the rental counter, the agent did not know what to do. He had to call his supervisor. There is a damage report we filled out, with the renter/driver personal data, insurance policy, damage description, whether police is notified, etc. One thing we forgot was to get the Vehicle Identification Number. We only wrote down the license plate, the make and the model.
Once we got home I called MC Assist again on Monday. Basically I gave all the same details plus the rental when and where, as well as contract number to the phone rep at Insurance dept. Then she gave me a Claim Number but the actual process wont start until we receive the claim package from MC Assist and send the completed forms back. Once they receive it, they will assign an adjuster to our claim and the adjuster will communicate with us directly to work on the claim. She also instructs that any thing we receive from rental agency we need to forward to MC Assist. As of now we have not yet received the package which she said will take 7 to 10 working days to arrive us. Rental agency already released the initial hold put on our card when we rented and billed us the rental part. Have not seen any hold and not hear from rental agency yet either. Our guess and hope is the rental agency will work with MC insurance directly and we just need to furnish all the paperwork. Hindsight, we would pay that lousy 80 bucks to avoid such hassle (and a potential bill). :(
Air :
We arrived Jacksonhole around noon on Sept 21 (from DFW) and departed Jacksonhole around noon on Sept 25. We used American Airlines award tickets for an extended 25 day trip - this 25K miles domestic award ticket (the "cheapest" that allows one fly between lower 48 and Canada, including Alaska with one Open-Jaw and one Stopover allowance) let us fly from MIA to ANC (via DFW) to start our 7-day Alaska South Bound Cruise that ended in Vancouver. After staying 10 days in Vancouver (visiting Vancouver Island and Pacific Rim National Park, as well as Fraser Valley) we flew down to DFW on Sept 20, overnighted at DFW and then flew back up to JAC on Sept 21 morning. It is a backward travel but it is the only way AA would fly us from Vancouver to Jacksonhole. The inconvenience is overnighting at DFW. The upshot is we only paid $35 tax per person for the tickets (The CSR even made sure we did not get double-charged tax in/out DFW for the leg between YVR and JAC). A paid ticket would have costed us $900 to $1200 per person for this itinerary. Thumbs up to AA. Also I sincerely urge everyone to get on airline / hotel loyalty programs - It Pay Off. I am more than happy to offer pointers in case anyone wants to know more.
Weather :
On our day of arrival it rained very hard. During our 4 day visit, only the 2nd day (largely outside park on the east side) and morning part of the 3rd day it was good weather. Weather rapidly deteriated past noon on our 3rd day. We encountered rain that turned into snow. It had hail storm shortly after midnight and in the early morning on our 4th day, and caused damage on our rental car. It again rained hard during daytime on our 4th day till late afternoon. Consequently we had no idea our rental car had sustained hail damage until the sun came out in late afternoon when we were already in Jacksonhole then we saw all those dents on the hood and on the roof. On the day we flew out, we finally got to see the lower portion of Grand Teton and by the time we were ready to board our plane, a tiny corner of the peak.
Car :
We reserved an intermediate size car with Thrifty. It took forever to get our rental car at the airport counter - the line was long and the process was slow - there was only one agent working. We saw neighboring counter Avis ran out of cars and their customers went to line up at Thrifty counter. The guy before us had a party of 4, they wanted an SUV but they did not have reservation. Thrifty ran out of SUV and the agent offered them a van instead. We ended up with a Ford Taurus, supposedly an upgrade from Dodge Stratus. Our experience is, you dont need an SUV - we have seen some old crankers still be able to navigate the road fairly well - however, you do want to make reservation, and more importantly, consider buying the physical damage waiver insurance. We did not think about that at the time - we had extensive driving experience in various road conditions, including gravel roads and severe weather conditions and we were very careful in parking etc. We never had any problem in our previous numerous rentals (in this trip alone we rented car 5 different occasions, for example). We always rented with a credit card that provided coverage anyway ... so naturally we declined the waiver which is $18.99 a day we later found out when we returned the car and had to file a damage report - for $80 we could have avoided the hassle ... It never occurred to us something like hail storm could happen and there is absolutely, positively nothing you can do unless you have covered parking and of course it is impossible in the park or anywhere in surrounding towns. I will detail the process of preparing the damage report and filing insurance claim with credit card at the end of this post.
Road conditions :
Generally pretty good, except those one-way side roads that lead to interesting points. The section between Chittendon Road and Canyon Village is finished ahead of schedule, with nice, smooth, new asphalt surface. That section is extremely winding and narrow, speed limit is 20mph but there are a few pullouts to let slow cars to pull over. The section from Chittendon Road to Tower Fall (North) is in need for some repairs - our guess is they may start that next summer.
Beartooth Hwy from Cooke City is under construction - the small section from Cooke City to Junction 296 - Chief Joseph Scenic Hwy - is opened with 30 minutes delay - cars move in one direction led by a pilot car. On our 3rd day after heavy rain, that section was closed. We went thru it on our 2nd day and drove the full length of Chief Joseph Scenic Hwy down South to Cody. Then from Cody we headed back inside Park via East Entrance. East Entrance is going thru heavy construction. Long stretch of sections of gravel surface or no surface (mud), led by pilot car going one direction at a time. There were sections that were two-way but road surface remains gravel mixed with mud. Supposedly all these would be done by mid Summer 2006.
Signpostings are generally good at main road junctions, but not very clear and way too small on service roads once you turn into the areas such as Old Faithful, Lake Village, etc. We wish they have light reflected signs for those areas. It is quite difficult to find your way inside the service areas after dark due to the many one-way, no entry signs and direction signs are all very small, situated low near ground, without lighting. Our 2nd night was booked at Old Faithful Lodge. We knew exactly where it was as we were there the day before. However when we arrived at 8:30pm we were unable to find the road at the vast parking lots that led to the lodge. We had to go to the only lighted building which turned out to be Old Faithful Snow Lodge to ask for direction. The guy at front desk told us the lodge we needed to go was just about 200 yd on our left, but we had to take a big round circle to get there ... and he shown us a map ... What a pain.
Lodging :
We stayed at different place each night : West Yellowstone, Old Faithful Lodge, Gardiner (North Entrance) and Jacksonhole. Our conclusion is we prefer to stay OUTSIDE park - for the same or less cost, one gets much more room, amenities, and only small inconvenience. On everynight outside park we had a 2 queenbed room with nice bathroom, coffee-maker, microwave and fridge. 2 of the 3 nights there were continental breakfast. On top of that I earned 750 AA miles for each stay due to regular and bonus miles. The night we stayed at Old Faithful Lodge, the room is tiny, the bed is a small doublebed and the bath is a small shower with a washing basin in the room. We slept poorly on that tiny bed. Bad decision of my part.
Scenaries and Highlights :
We like West Thumb due to its small size to walk thru and the unique geysers that erupt from the lake. We only walked the short geyser hill loop at Old Faithful area as the Grand Geyser and the Castle Geyser have a vastly apart eruption prediction time - 1.50pm + - 90 min and 5.00pm + - 60 min respectively - dont have enough time to spend waiting. Grand and Castle are much grander than Old Faithful when they erupt but the 3 hours in total waiting time just not something we would do.
Midway Geyser Basin and Lower Geyser Basin turned out to be much more interesting. We wish we stop at Grand Prismatic Spring at Midway Geyser Basin when we drove towards north on the evening of our first day as weather was ok at the time. We wound up visiting it on our 3rd day in heavy rain so it was not possible to take good video. The hot spring is the largest in the park and the steam is of light blue color, very pretty. But what we lost our opportunity at Grand Prismatic Spring was more than compensated for when we encountered an unexpected sunset at Great Fountain Geyser ready to erupt when we detoured from the main road and drove the one-way North Firehold Lake Drive. I strongly recommend the 2 one-way drives between Madison and Old Faithful. If you are as lucky as we have been, you would see the most beautiful sunset with gold ray shining on an overflowing Great Fountain Geyser which would overflow 75 to 115 minutes before eruption. When we passed by at around 7:15pm we caught the sunset and had taken some gorgeous video. A geyser just to the right also erupted very high while we were waiting like others for this one to erupt (the prediction was between 7:25 and 8:30 and it came at almost 8pm when the last daylight was about gone) It was one of the highlight of the trip. When you go, better check with Visitor Center for the eruption prediction for this geyser. When we passed it again 2 days later, the eruption time was predicted at 9pm and then 1am for the following day, and the area was drying up. We just had dumb luck to catch such breath-taking sunset. We did the Southbound one-way Firehole Canyon Drive (just south of Madison junction) on our 4th day. It was a very scenic drive along the canyon with waterfall and a swimming hole - Yes, they make a section of the lake (more like a stream to me) available for swimming as the water is warm yearlong. In other sections of the lake on the north-bound one-way drive, the water is actually steaming !
The best scenaries of the whole trip were the drive of Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, AND Chief Joseph Scenic Hwy OUTSIDE PARK. We were lucky when we did this long loop (total 277 miles) on our 2nd day, the weather was very good. We started at West Yellowstone around 9am, went thru Madison, to Norris (without stopping as we planned to do our stop the following day), to Grand Canyon of YS, where we spent quite some time to walk the trails at both Lower Fall and Upper Fall, then went North to Tower Junction (walked the Tower Fall also) and then headed East to NorthEast Entrance. Waited 30 minutes at Cooke City before we were piloted to US 212 then we headed South on 296. The view is incredible - wide-open mountain range with valleys and big sky on winding mountain road - This is THE BEST VIEW, the most scenic 44 miles in our whole trip. From 296 we changed to Route 120 and 16 miles south we were in Cody. Cody is a nice town with a rich history. There is a grand scale history center dedicated to Buffalo Bill. There is a Super WalMart on the way out of Cody towards East Entrance. We stocked up our fruits, vegie and other food items there. Once outside park you can drive close to 60mph, so it helps.
Norris Basin - we did some short trails to see the colorful geysers and mud pools. One can get a grand view just at the top of the basin - that is probably the 5 minutes most tour buses spent here. However, you wouldn't get to see the various colored geysers and puffing mud pools in the colors of Cafe Latte, or more weird, blue or yellow unless you take the boardwalk trails.
We did not like Mommoth mainly due to the dried up Terrace Spring. Lake Village is not impressed either. We much prefer West Thumb than Yellowstone Lake. Grant Village Visitor Center is worth a visit. This is the only visitor center we stopped by. It has display of the history of the Park, the 1988 big fire which burnt 1 million acres of the 2.5 million acres of Park land.
Animals :
Bisons are everywhere. I got scared when they just sat next to the boardwalk at Geyser Hill Loop at Old Faithful. I walked quickly and ginerly in front of them - they are no more than 2 feet away ... They also can be annoying when they walk in the middle of the road and block the traffic for a long time.
We encountered our first Elk at West Thumb. First a lone female, then a small group, about 4 or 5 female and a mid-size bull. Then we saw a playful cyote. We had some nice video clip of him playing with a tree branch.
We had 3 great encounters with animals.
First one was a grizzly rambling at roadside on the riverbank, on Hwy 14, about 5 or 6 miles before East Entrance. It is not a big grizzly though, my guess is it is probably only 3 to 4 years old, just left its mother for a year. (Grizzlies stay with their mother for at least 2 years, 1 yearling and 2 yearling ...). It is very close to the guardrail playing in the bushes. We had caught him on video turned up his head and facing us for a few seconds.
Second one was a HUGE group of Elks we saw at Mommoth Spring (the town). At first we saw a big bull sitting right at the lawn next to the road thru town. He is agreesive, barking very often. By the way, we heard Elk bulls barking all thru the park even when we dont see them. Some people may confuse the sound with Wolf. I strongly doubt one can hear wolf as there are less than 40 wolves in the vastness of the park. Anyway, then we saw 2 more bulls sitting on another lawn, also barking from time to time. Finally when we walked closer, we saw a herd, may be 20 to 30 females at the hillside lawn and a Big Bull walking down the hill towards the herd. The herd was so large that the town had several volunteers out to direct people and traffic as Elks can be dangerous. The herd stayed there till very late at night when we passed thru again around 9pm and they were virtually everywhere. We had to stop to let a female walked pass in front of our car.
Third one was a black bear we saw at the roadside woods just before we got to Lamar Valley at about 7pm. The guy was looking for foods, digging dirts and rumbling thru bushes. We took a good video of him with all the actions. This encounter made our double-back 60 miles drive from North Entrance to Lamar Valley at the dusk wellworth it.
Insurance Claim :
We rented our car with Platinum Mastercard which provided secondary rental car insurance for physical damage, including out-of-fleet downtime. Since our own car insurance carries liability only, the MC insurance becomes primary. Not all credit cards have rental car insurance, and not all insurance coverages are the same. For example, Visa Signature only covers collison damage insurance and no downtime coverage. It would not help us if we have used a Visa as the damage we have is not from collison but from hail storm.
Once we discovered the damage, we called our card company (Citicard) and they told us to call MC Assist. It was on Saturday evening. MC Assist phone rep said Insurance Claim Dept only work M to F 8 to 8, but she told me what documentations we would need to gather : Rental Car Contract, Repair Estimate, Police Report. So we went to look for police station at Jacksonhole and explained to them we needed a police report for insurance purpose eventhough there is no crime committed. They were nice enough to let a constable taking care of us and took the info, issued a case number, the report would have to get approval from a sergent and then it would be mailed to us.
We spent the morning of our departure day cutting color dots to identify the various sizes dents - nickel, dime and just noticeable, and we videoed the car. We then made a statement describing the damage - where and when that happened and the description of the damages - how many are nickel size, how many are dime size, depth ranging from 1/16 inch to 1/32 inch, and how many are just noticeable, on the hood and on the roof.
When we got to the rental counter, the agent did not know what to do. He had to call his supervisor. There is a damage report we filled out, with the renter/driver personal data, insurance policy, damage description, whether police is notified, etc. One thing we forgot was to get the Vehicle Identification Number. We only wrote down the license plate, the make and the model.
Once we got home I called MC Assist again on Monday. Basically I gave all the same details plus the rental when and where, as well as contract number to the phone rep at Insurance dept. Then she gave me a Claim Number but the actual process wont start until we receive the claim package from MC Assist and send the completed forms back. Once they receive it, they will assign an adjuster to our claim and the adjuster will communicate with us directly to work on the claim. She also instructs that any thing we receive from rental agency we need to forward to MC Assist. As of now we have not yet received the package which she said will take 7 to 10 working days to arrive us. Rental agency already released the initial hold put on our card when we rented and billed us the rental part. Have not seen any hold and not hear from rental agency yet either. Our guess and hope is the rental agency will work with MC insurance directly and we just need to furnish all the paperwork. Hindsight, we would pay that lousy 80 bucks to avoid such hassle (and a potential bill). :(
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