I made a reservation to pick up a mid-size car on ...

I made a reservation to pick up a mid-size car on a Sunday at 3:00 PM about three weeks before my flight. Advantage and Payless were both about $150 total for a rental from Sunday through Friday while all the other major brands were over $250. I read multiple negative reviews for both but figured that rude service and pushing hard to buy the optional collision damage waiver would be a small price to save $100. Shortly after reserving my flight, hotel, and rental car I realized I would have to move my flight back a few hours to arrive around 5:00 PM. I called the Advantage office twice and was reassured both times (by the same employee) that arriving a couple of hours late was fine as long as I picked up the car before the end of the day.

The first sign of trouble was while waiting for the Advantage shuttle van at the San Antonio Airport I saw shuttles from every other rental car company pass by two or three times. Finally after about 20 minutes the Advantage shuttle came and took me to the facility. I arrived at the facility around 6:00 PM and there were two employees at the desk plus the manager in the back. An old woman in front of me was waiting several minutes without being helped and when she asked the older employee if he was having computer problems (he was visibly frustrated and kept walking back to the manager s office) he literally just started laughing and didn t answer her. When she asked for the manager he finally said that he was having trouble logging in to the system and the manager stepped in at another computer to help her.

The younger employee helped me and after a couple of minutes said that he couldn t find my reservation. According to him it had been cancelled. I told him that I hadn t cancelled it and he informed me that they had cancelled it when I didn t pick it up within an hour of my reservation time due to heavy demand. Then he said that I would now have to pay the prevailing rate which was about $260. I told him that I had a reservation and I expected it to be honored. The older employee came over and basically told me to take it or leave it. Nothing in all the fine print of my reservation mentioned they could arbitrarily cancel my reservation and try to charge me more. When I asked the older employee where in my contract it stated this he handed me a rental contract and of course the only mention of cancellation was if you didn t pick up the vehicle the same day they would charge you for at least one day of the rental.

At this point I asked to speak to the manager only to find out that she was outside checking out vehicles. I started looking on my phone at what was available at Avis, Enterprise, etc. figuring that if I had to pay $100 more I certainly wasn t going to pay it to Advantage. After waiting for 20 minutes for the manager the younger employee finally came over and asked for my driver s license and credit card. He went ahead and honored my reservation with the same type of vehicle at the same price.

While I was ultimately satisfied I could have just as easily given up as many others would do and paid another $100. This type of bait and switch tactic is deplorable and the fact that my original reservation was finally honored revealed that the story about cancelling reservations due to high demand and being late was simply a tactic to try and get me to pay more than I had originally agreed to. I would give 1.5 stars if that was possible since I did get what I asked for. However, the sheer hassle that I went through compared to my experience at (almost) every other rental car company made that $100 savings hard earned.