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Cars are rented out with the assumption that prior renters will return the cars on time. If that doesn't happen, you will be told that they don't have a car for you.

The reservation system probably overbooks to some extent because a certain percentage of reserved cars are never picked up.

Many rental outlets are franchise operations. It may say Enterprise or Budget on the sign but it's Joe's Car Rental LLC running the place. They may be slow at updating rentals and returns in the system. It's not all one homogenous company.

Enterprise is usually not a franchise:

https://www.enterprise.com/en/global-franchise-opportunities...

> Please note that we do not franchise our brands in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, France or Germany.

Car rental inventory is absurd, and renting a box truck is even worse. I've learned over the years that a "reservation" is a best case scenario. - nothing's real until money changes hands. There's also a lot of weird nuance around renting at an airport and renting at an in-town location. And even when you've turned down all the needless upsells and paid for your car, you have to be careful about further sleight of hand!

Earlier this year, I reserved a mid-size vehicle for a few days' drive for a business trip, and after they charged my card, they told me they're bringing around a compact vehicle. I probably should have let it go, the difference in price wasn't that much (and was a work expense) but old habits die hard. "That's not what I paid for - either you can refund me the difference, or you can bring me a mid-size sedan."

They said if I could wait 15 minutes, they'd bump me up from a Hyundai Accent to a larger Toyota, but it wasn't until I sat in the car that I learned that even as a new car, it was as bare-bones as they make them. No CarPlay/Android Auto, the in-car GPS was disabled, no cruise control - I'm sure it would have had manual windows if that were an option. The Hyundai would have been a better ride, I shouldn't have fussed.

But yeah, U-Haul or Ryder or whatever, it's the stone ages there. Years ago, I drove halfway across the state to pick up a sixteen foot truck I'd reserved, and when I got there - "Yeah we don't have a sixteen foot truck, I don't know why it let you reserve that." A smaller truck wasn't an option for what we were moving. I ended up having to call around and hit some local place up.

Penske is the winner there (edit: in my experience, YMMV). We moved from CA to OR in spring 2021. Got a res through UHaul for a box truck, and got a call 24 hours later basically telling me that they were massively overbooked and wouldn't be able to confirm a truck for me until the morning we were supposed to pack the truck up and leave. There's not a snowball's chance in hell that I'm gonna plan for a move with that level of uncertainty, lol.

Called Penske, because I'd always had a good business relationship with them via my job. I was told, "Oh, yeah, we don't do that shit. If you book a truck that day, it's gonna be here, guaranteed."

Sure enough, Penske had it. We packed up the truck, I got on the road, and about 45 minutes later I got a call from UHaul telling me that I could pick up an available truck, but it was three hours away.

I laughed loudly and just hung up.

I've probably rented box trucks a dozen times in my life for various personal and professional endeavors, including a stint of regular quarterly rentals for several years, and two cross-country moves. At this point Penske gets my money no matter what; I don't even look elsewhere.

I rented cars in Europe, Carribean, Israel and the US. Some things I've learned:

* In the US, Hertz with corporate discounts and status is usually the cheapest and most convenient option. Walk to the car, pick your car from the President's Circle, drive off. Absolutely the best experience I've had with rentals.

* Without status, it's a coin toss: Avis or Hertz, with Avis generally having worse service across the board.

* In Europe, Avis was the worst. In Israel I think it's a franchise, it was all manual entries, long waiting lines. In Portugal I had to wait in line for 1.5 hours to pick up the car because I wasn't Preferred. Their Preferred booth was empty the entire time. All I had to do was validate my drivers license, and they still refused to accept me at Preferred because they print the preferred customers in the morning. Almost missed my flight.

* Europcar in Israel - cheaper but I wasted an hour in line to _return_ the car.

* In Aruba (I think), Avis doesn't tell you they run shuttles to the airport and you have to wait 30+ min for the shuttle to come around and pick you up.

* I rented 26' trucks from U-Haul twice. Both times went well, though the first truck was very bouncy and the second truck's engine light was on, but otherwise I got from A to B with no issues.

But this all pales in comparison to this car rental company in Moldova (Eastern Europe) that took $100 to book an SUV a month in advance, and then when I arrived they said "we don't have it". The only car they had was $50/day more expensive and instead of apologizing and giving me that car, despite being more expensive, they told me that my only option was to pay more to get this car. They were fixing the A/C outside while I was trying to explain to them that it was a ridiculous demand. A bunch of crooks. I walked away. Sixt was a better experience there, and cheaper than Avis, though 4rent.md is definitely the best option with great customer service.

> Car rental inventory is absurd, and renting a box truck is even worse. I've learned over the years that a "reservation" is a best case scenario. - nothing's real until money changes hands.

As Seinfeld said, they're good at taking the reservation, but not good at holding it.

No CarPlay? Every Avis rental car I get seems to have it. Which brand?

My observation of rental car companies is that they have figured out how to run on absolute skeleton crews.

I rented one earlier this month online. When I showed up they handed me a confirmation and told me to pick a car and drive, key was in the cup holder. They had a manned exit barricade to confirm the car you chose, but that was it. I'm not even sure they cared if I picked a car that I didn't reserve, the exit gate person scanned the car and reservation, so it probably would have just updated the reservation on the spot. I don't think it's even possible to predict with certainty what your inventory is going to be 2-3 days out with this sytem.

Just 2 people on the rental side, although I'm sure they have a cleaning/ turnover crew.

> Here’s the baffling bit. I make a reservation this morning at Enterprise in a KC suburb and get back a confirmation number, cool. Five minutes later I get a call back that they don’t have any cars available. I ask him why, because I got the confirmation number. He says the website isn’t accurate at the moment. WTF? So when a car is rented and driven off the lot the database doesn’t update? Or worse, the local dealer data is not synced to corporate in real time?

Same thing happened to me. My wife even called the night before and talked to someone (not at the airport, though) and confirmed. The guy at the pickup had to tell 6 people at 6am that they were only honoring reservations made at least three days prior, and all of them had confirmed numbers.

Likewise, no cars are available within a two hour drive. It looks like the first few days of problems sucked up any available inventory in the system.

I never thought the movie Planes, Trains, and Automobiles was a documentary.

Not that this helps but car rental places are like trailer/truck rentals. A particular location will often just be a franchise and own their own vehicles. They'll also handle vehicles from other locations/corporate but they have their own little fleet. They charge one-way rentals based on the likelihood of that vehicle returning to them in some time frame and/or them getting a replacement vehicle while the one-way is rented.

More generally they schedule based on their return schedules. If they have a car scheduled to return at noon and you set your pickup time to one, they assume they'll have that car and be able to rent it to you. If I don't drop it off at noon they can't assume I'll drop it off at 12:01 so they need to let you know it won't be available (since they can't predict my actions).

This is all compounded by agents on the lot renting out cars under the radar or booking agents doing some customer service override. They are incentivized to rent cars, not rent to specific people. For them it doesn't matter if your car is unavailable, it got rented out which made them money.

Good luck getting a car and making your drive.

I’ve found for one way rentals, going between two larger airport locations is the best way to keep the price reasonable (and probably pay some of the difference for Ubers)

Car rentals are a total consumer disaster and have always been this way. It keeps being like this because generally you end up with a car and that's all people need. Special shout out to Sixt that promised me a volvo xc90 over the phone and gave me a cadillac midsize crossover instead when I showed up. The employee at the manhattan location told me they've never even seen a Sixt XC90 at that location.

Just to give you a possible cheat code. Despite them saying you can't when booking...

I've had great luck booking an enterprise rental car from an airport (this is key), and on the booking saying returning to the same airport.

After receiving the car, calling corporate and requesting a different city drop off. The only requirement being that it was dropped off at another airport.

Paid $75 a day for an SUV, from SF and dropped off in Bishop, CA. Reno was the same cost, as well but Bishop made sense. Did this a week ago. Worst case there's an additional cost but is it going to be $1,000 more... no way.

From what I can tell, rental car companies are not setup to easily service a one way rentals,

Which isn't surprising because at some point, someone needs to bring that car back to it's home base.

Indeed. Lots of them are franchises that own their own stock.

I thought none of the 3 US car rental brand holding companies franchised. But it seems that Avis Budget and Hertz do franchise. Enterprise does not.

I wonder if that is why I seem to prefer Enterprise. Not that I would touch Hertz with a 10ft pole anyway.

And Alamo appears to just be a front company for Enterprise.

That is why I wrote “3 US car rental brand holding companies”. They are all part of either Enterprise, Avis Budget, or Hertz.

Which is also why they share the same offices, countertops, parking lots, and I assume cars too when you go to the rental place in an airport.

They know how to take the reservation, they just don’t know how to _hold_ the reservation.

Great Seinfeld bit :)

Doesn’t it blow our minds that the U.S. is supposedly the most advanced country in the world, and yet our transportation systems are designed worse than seems imaginable.

On rental cars, I know it’s a meme, but my god it continually surprises me how it seems the agents have to rewrite the mainframe just to hand me keys for a pre-arranged reservation.

At $1200 it's likely cheaper to buy a used car at your origin and sell it at your destination. Availability is also probably less fucked up than the rental market.

I didn’t even think about that, how surreal.

For whatever it’s worth, I’ve used National extensively for years (we have a corporate contract) for business and personal, and have generally had positive experiences. The web site has been clear when inventory didn’t exist, haven’t run into the app-reality inconsistency problems.

Try a moving truck rental, and rent a van. They're set up for one-way, and often have stock when car rentals are sold out.

Some of my ex-wife's colleagues returned from a conference in Denver back to the east coast in a u-haul van after all air travel was shut down on 9/11

Good grief. Did they buy some bean bag chairs or something?

I was also in STL when this happened. Had to drive 4 hours away to Evansville, IN in order to get a rental car. Just showed up here and they told me I was lucky to reserve it last night, they’re now turning away walk ups at the counter.

Very interested if it's my area suburb, as an occasional Enterprise customer.

There are some pretty cool threads on the subject of rental car companies here on HN.