Have you had a bad experience with a car rental company?

Yeah I had to rent a car for a while because mine got stolen and on the first day the got a flat tire on my way to work, so i just called them to tow it and I walked the rest of the way to work. The other car they gave me worked fine though.

Only one bad experience. Almost all my hire-cars were for work trips, and one of those involved us flying to another part of the country and picking up a car for the onwards trip of perhaps 60 miles.

I had carefully booked one with manual transmission, but the hirer's office had mis-read it and I ended up struggling with an unfamiliar car anyway (just where are the far corners of this acre of steel and glass?) on busy urban roads on a dark, wet Winter nights, and automatic transmission!

How I avoided running into things or skidding by too-harsh braking, I don't know, though I became accustomed to it by the end of the mainly-rural drive.

.....

The oddest was when I had bring a hire-car back to base, on my own. The distance was over 100 miles and we were expected to refuel it as closely as possible to the works to avoid the hirer's "refuelling fee" on top of the fuel cost. Someone else had booked and driven it on the outwards journey, using probably only about 20 litres.

I stopped at a filling-station only two miles from "home". Found eventually how to open the filler-cap, with a secret latch in some unlikely place.

Ah. What fuel? The cap label had only a meaningless heiroglyph, no words or numbers, and the tank was so well designed I could not smell whatever was in there. No owner's handbook in the vehicle, either.

I asked in the garage - no-one there could work it out either, though it didn't occur to any of us to lift the bonnet to see if it had sparking-plugs, if visible anyway of course. I think, now, a garage could find out from DVLA, simply by using the registration number, but perhaps not there and then.

I could only apologise, drive the rest of the way and explain to my manager that even a filling-station could not work out the right fuel!

This summer I reserved a uhaul two months before the day I needed it, and 2 days before I got it they called me and said they didn’t have what I needed anymore, and the backup option was something I wasn’t able to drive.
They DID have what I needed on the lot, I could see them. They just must’ve ended up giving it to people that needed it longer than the day I needed it.

I rented a car from enterprise and I got pulled over in it because the temporary tag that was on the car was EXPIRED, and enterprise let me rent it like that. I had to take the car back and they gave me another one. They also did some other crappy stuff.

There are quite a few car rental companies in Europe geared towards people on vacation that love to add on extra hidden charges before you get the car and they'll rarely ever give you the kind of car that they advertise on their websites. So they'll show you a chariot for a cheap price and what you actually get is a trash can on wheels for which you have to leave your lungs as a deposit and pay with your spleen for dinosaur attack insurance 🤔

I have never rented a car before

No, but I’ve only done it once soooo.

Yes this only needs two words "Thrifty rentals"

Not recently

🤚

Who hasn't?

Why were you renting a car for