First time on Turo
Most people booking with us have rented from a counter their whole lives and have never used Turo. It is not complicated, but it is different, and there is one step worth doing days before you travel rather than at the airport. Here is the honest version, start to finish.
Turo is a marketplace. You are renting a specific car from the person who owns it, rather than a category of car from a company. In practice that changes four things, and it is worth being straight about all of them.
A counter sells you "a midsize or similar" and you find out what that means when you get there. You are booking the green Corvette, or the black Tahoe, and that is what shows up.
No line, no upsell, no declining the insurance three times. We bring the car to you at the airport or to an address. Counters also keep hours; a delayed late arrival is exactly the case they handle worst.
The identity check a counter does at the desk, Turo does in advance. That is the part people get caught out by, so it has its own step below.
You still walk around the vehicle. The difference is you do it with your own phone, on your own time, and the photos are timestamped in the app as your record rather than a note on somebody else's clipboard.
You can do everything in a web browser, but the app is better for the photo step at pickup, and it is where trip messages land. Two minutes.
This is the one that matters, and the reason this page exists.
Before your first trip, Turo has to approve you as a driver. In the app it is under your account, and it asks for your driver's license and some basic details. Turo may also ask for an extra photo or run background checks as part of verifying the account.
Most people are approved instantly — but Turo allows up to 24 hours. Which means you should do this now, or at least the day before you fly, not while you are standing at baggage claim. It costs nothing and it does not commit you to anything. Getting it out of the way is the single most useful thing on this page.
Age minimums are set per vehicle. You will see the requirement on each car's listing before you book.
Come back here, or go straight to our listings, and put your dates in. The exact total comes back right away with delivery already in it, so there is no quote to wait for and no delivery fee to discover later. About a minute.
Booking runs through Turo rather than through us, which is deliberate: that is where the protection plan, the payment and the review history on both sides live.
Tell us where. Blue Grass (LEX), Louisville (SDF) and Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky (CVG) are all covered, as is any address within roughly fifty miles of Frankfort as the crow flies — which in road terms reaches a good deal further, including well into Northern Kentucky.
We ask for three hours' notice, and that is the same for every airport and every address. You will get the exact meeting details through Turo once your trip is confirmed.
At pickup the app walks you through documenting the car. Turo's own guidance is thorough about it: roughly fifteen shots of the outside from different angles with close-ups of any existing scratches or dents, and around eight of the interior covering the fuel level and the odometer.
That sounds like more work than a counter, and it is — about five minutes of it. It is also the part that protects you. At a counter you point at a scratch and hope somebody writes it down. Here the evidence is yours, timestamped, sitting in your own account. Anything already on the car when you arrive is on record before you drive away.
Take them anyway even when the car is spotless. It takes five minutes once and it settles any question later.
The same in reverse. Return it where you agreed, refuel it, take your end-of-trip photos in the app, and you are done. No counter, no line, no waiting for somebody to inspect it in front of you.
The only part with a real waiting time is approval, and only sometimes. Do that one early and the rest happens on the day without you thinking about it.
Get approved to drive first, then put your dates in. If the car you want is free, it takes a couple of minutes.