A little rant about renting cars

Traveling as much as we do there are a few things that have to be completed every week. We need a hotel and a rental car. Usually this is fairly straight forward, hotels must be within 15 minutes of event sites and we use Enterprise Rent-a-Car. They pick you up.  We aren’t flying in, we are driving and going to an airport is not a good option, they charge all sorts of fees for the same service a local branch provides.  There are some other companies that have sporadic pick-up service but you can’t rely on it like Enterprise.

However there are the other occasions where logistics don’t allow for us to use a local enterprise branch, ie. a late or weekend arrival. During those times we are forced to go without transportation or use an airport branch. My client is wonderful and gives us vouchers at the beginning of the year we can use at Avis. This saves them and my firm money, we are happy to use them. If only Avis wasn’t the worst! I have never (in 6 years) used an Avis branch where they weren’t either rude or incompetent. Usually they treat us like we are coming in and asking to borrow their personal car. That you are somehow shady for needing a rental car. Or like last week, it took an hour, yes an hour to rent a car.

I love Enterprise, they are always professional, responsive and at most it takes me 10 minutes to get rolling. There is one branch I visit often where it they get me rolling in 3 minutes.  Avis needs an attitude adjustment, I will jump through hoops for Enterprise or to avoid Avis once the vouchers are used.  For someone who doesn’t rent often a rude desk agent won’t affect their option that much but for business travelers it wears on you.  The dread of having to deal with a nasty agent, same goes for some hotels.

***This is part of a series of posts called “Travel Tuesday“, each covering topics unique to our lifestyle***