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So in my attempts to get my family home I’ve discovered that rental car company web sites are atrocious. The direct company sites (not Expedia for example) do

So in my attempts to get my family home I’ve discovered that rental car company web sites are atrocious. The direct company sites (not Expedia for example) do not give you the ability to search for vehicles at multiple locations within a mileage radius. You are forced to enter a single location for pickup. This is also true for drop off. From what I can tell, rental car companies are not setup to easily service a one way rentals, which is what most people need right now. I’ve managed to reserve a car for pickup in KC and drop off in Phoenix for tomorrow. The quote for the two days, over $1200. This isn’t really a web site issue but it gives some context. 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? This is a cascading mess. They don’t even have availability in Joplin, MO who’s is 3 hours from KC.

Anechoic 4y ago
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.
- trollied 4y ago
  Indeed. Lots of them are franchises that own their own stock.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    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.
    - 0x445442 4y ago
      And Alamo appears to just be a front company for Enterprise.
      - lotsofpulp 4y ago
        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.
leviathant 4y ago
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.
- kylehotchkiss 4y ago
  No CarPlay? Every Avis rental car I get seems to have it. Which brand?
- hrunt 4y ago
  > 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.
- jjulius 4y ago
  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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bluesroo 4y ago
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.
drewg123 4y ago
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
- thomasjudge 4y ago
  Good grief. Did they buy some bean bag chairs or something?
giantrobot 4y ago
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.
kylehotchkiss 4y ago
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)
BMFX00 4y ago
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.
SoftTalker 4y ago
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.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  Enterprise is usually not a franchise: https://www.enterprise.com/en/global-franchise-opportunities.html 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.
hrunt 4y ago
> 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.
- chasd00 4y ago
  I never thought the movie Planes, Trains, and Automobiles was a documentary.
hk1337 4y ago
They know how to take the reservation, they just don’t know how to _hold_ the reservation.
- dsimmons 4y ago
  Great Seinfeld bit :)
cowmoo728 4y ago
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.
barrenko 4y ago
There are some pretty cool threads on the subject of rental car companies here on HN.
bmitc 4y ago
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.
typest 4y ago
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.
bradleyankrom 4y ago
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.
ThrustVectoring 4y ago
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.
- chasd00 4y ago
  I didn’t even think about that, how surreal.
firebones 4y ago
Very interested if it's my area suburb, as an occasional Enterprise customer.

Anechoic 4y ago

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.

trollied 4y ago
Indeed. Lots of them are franchises that own their own stock.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  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.
  - 0x445442 4y ago
    And Alamo appears to just be a front company for Enterprise.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      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.

leviathant 4y ago

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.

kylehotchkiss 4y ago
No CarPlay? Every Avis rental car I get seems to have it. Which brand?
hrunt 4y ago
> 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.
jjulius 4y ago
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.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

bluesroo 4y ago

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.

drewg123 4y ago

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

thomasjudge 4y ago
Good grief. Did they buy some bean bag chairs or something?

giantrobot 4y ago

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.

kylehotchkiss 4y ago

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)

BMFX00 4y ago

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.

SoftTalker 4y ago

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.

lotsofpulp 4y ago
Enterprise is usually not a franchise: https://www.enterprise.com/en/global-franchise-opportunities.html 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.

hrunt 4y ago

> 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.

chasd00 4y ago
I never thought the movie Planes, Trains, and Automobiles was a documentary.

hk1337 4y ago

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

dsimmons 4y ago
Great Seinfeld bit :)

cowmoo728 4y ago

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.

barrenko 4y ago

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

bmitc 4y ago

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.

typest 4y ago

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.

bradleyankrom 4y ago

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.

ThrustVectoring 4y ago

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.

chasd00 4y ago
I didn’t even think about that, how surreal.

firebones 4y ago

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