Car rental woes

I go to Ohio for a week every June to visit my parents and grandparents. My mode of transportation has changed over the years, from taking the bus, to the train, to flying and having my parents drive an hour and a half to pick me up, and finally to flying and getting my own rental car at the airport. This year, however, flying and getting a car there was going to run me about $600 (!) so I looked into just getting a car in Chicago and driving the eight hours to my folks' house.

I tried all kinds of sites to see what kind of deal I could get. I tried going to each car rental site individually. I tried Priceline. I tried my university's alumni discount program. I tried my Working Advantage account. Finally, I found carrentals.com and managed to get a deal! One hundred and fifty dollars to rent a car for the week! It was through Enterprise and the pick-up place was a only a few blocks from where I work. I usually use Budget, but if Enterprise was going to be cheaper then I was willing to give them a shot.

At 7:30AM, I reach the Enterprise office where I will be renting my car and realized very quickly that this is going to be a different car rental experience. Let me explain. At Budget I walk in, hand over my driver's license and a credit card, they check it while I sign the contract, they hand me my keys and cards and say 'Have a nice trip!'. When I get back I just hand in the keys and a couple days later my card is charged exactly what I was quoted when I made the original reservation. No muss, no fuss.

At Enterprise they want all sorts of information! They want to know where I work, what their phone number is, where am I going, etc. Odd, but ok. Then they take me out to the lot to 'see my options'. I thought maybe I was going to be picking out which car I wanted in my price range, which would have been pretty cool. However, this turned out to be an upsell which is much more annoying. I could have this car for an extra $30 or that car for an extra $50 or maybe I want an SUV for an extra $100? I declined them all and said I just wanted the car I reserved, which turned out to be a Hyundai Accent.

What a piece of crap that car turned out to be! There were manual locks and windows (I didn't realize they even made cars this way anymore), no cruise control, and the most uncomfortable seat I think I've ever had to sit in. When I got on the highway it took almost a full minute to get up to 60 miles an hour and when it reached that point it started to shake so bad that my hands went numb holding the vibrating steering wheel. Not exactly the greatest car for a 1000 mile road trip! I think it's only redeeming feature was that I could plug my iPod into the radio.

When I dropped the car off again at the end of the week, I told them about the shaking and said it might have an alignment problem. They told me I was the fourth person to complain about that, but their mechanics say it's fine. Seriously? If everybody is complaining about it, then it is not fine.

Then came the real shocker. Remember that $150/week quote I received earlier? That was before the insurance which they told me was required, regardless of what insurance I have through my credit card, and before taxes. Final total? $324. That's more than twice as much as the original quote!! To be fair, $60 of that was because I locked the keys in the car and they had to send someone out to get it open, but that still makes it a total of $260.  That is quite a bit more than I was expecting.  And that is the last time I will be using Enterprise for my car rentals. I'm sticking with Budget.