Prepay to guarantee availability?
 

Everything I read advises against pre-paying rental cars. I have a trip planned for a few months from now to a major U.S. city and my biggest anxiety is over having a reservation but no cars available when I get there. I've heard of this happening frequently among friends and family in the past year. Does prepaying guarantee availability? What other recommendations are there to guarantee availability? I have member cards from several rental car companies.

Gary

This is a question that comes up again and again, and our answer is that prepaying for your rental does not make it more likely that you will get a car vs. paying at the counter.

It's a common misconception that a prepaid reservation is somehow "guaranteed" while a pay-at-counter reservation is not. In fact, they are both guaranteed, but that doesn't mean that rental companies don't sometimes plan poorly or run into unforeseen circumstances and can run out of cars. Just because you have prepaid for your reservation doesn't mean that the rental company will "set one aside" for you. You are going to essentially be in the same boat as everyone else who has a reservation (whether prepaid or not), and we say this with almost 15 years of experience in the industry.

+1 Based on too many personal experiences with this exact scenario. Only reason for prepaying was a discounted price. Never had a misconception that this would "guarantee" a car would be available - much less my preferred make/model in a given class.

Well, no less a person than Beth Gibson, vice president for customer experience at Avis, disagrees with you - this doesn't mean that you are wrong and she is right. Wouldn't be the first time someone in charge of customer experience didn't have a clue about real-life customer experience.

Help! I Reserved a Rental Car, but There Was No Car for Me. - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

An Avis representative had a different take, telling me the best way to ensure you get a car is to register for Avis Preferred, a loyalty program. She told me it was easy and free, and she was right. (I’m their latest member.) Ms. Gibson agreed, and added that prepaying would also make you a higher priority. Another pro tip: She recommended taking the extra minute or two to provide your flight information when you book a car, which allows the agency to automatically adjust your arrival time if your plane is late.

Nothing "guarantees" availability", but belonging to the free program for a particular rental car company (Avis Preferred, Hertz Gold, etc), and being logged in to that program when you make the reservation, greatly increases the likelihood of availability, as (at least with those two programs) they have to put those cars on a display board that everyone sees, so they don't want to put "no car available" on that board, while people who don't belong to the rental car company program are told in private if there's no car available. And thus if they don't have enough cars for everyone, they're more likely to want to tell that to people in private. So even if for that reason alone (and that may not be the only reason), your odds of getting a car of some sort are greater if you belong to the rental car company program. And in case the car you get isn't the one you want, you are at the booth for the program members near where the rental cars are, instead of the main reservation booth back inside the airport, and the booth for program members is much more likely to be able to accommodate you than the booth back inside airport that non-members have to use.

So were your friends and family (who you said had experiences with no cars available) members of the rental car program and going to the display board to find their cars? Or were they non-members going to the main booth inside the airport, as most people are?

In my experience;

• Pre pay doesn't guarantee a car, or the vehicle type you requested.
• Belonging to a free program doesn't guarantee a car or the vehicle type you requested.
• Putting your flight number so they can track your flight and respond if you are delayed doesn't actually happen. They just say 'see customer service' and act like you should have told them.
• They never put 'no car available' on the board, they just put 'see customer service'
• If you have a one-way rental, no matter whether you prepaid, or whether you called before hand, or whether you have an express rental card or a loyalty card, they will still act shocked at the counter, then say that they need to change vehicles, and then go get a clunker and give it a quick wash while you wait.
• I refuse to prepay, and I am usually able to get a lowered rate when they inevitably put me in a lesser vehicle classification. When pre-paying, if they don't have vehicles and you have to go elsewhere, or they put you in a clunker, or some lower vehicle class than you paid for, you have to pull teeth to get the difference refunded.

This can depend on the program and the location. Yes, of course, what you say can happen and thus you can't expect a better result, even though you may get a better result in some cases.

I know this worked better pre-Covid, so maybe they need staff in some programs/locations to track these airline flight changes, and with insufficient staff post-Covid, that may be why it's not working correctly now so often. I also wonder if this automated in some programs but manually implemented in other programs?

I prepaid for a car with Budget once, and on the day of my reservation, they called me and wanted to confirm that I would be showing up. They said they were running low on cars and wanted to make sure they'd have a car available for me since I had prepaid for it.