Recently, I was coordinating a trip to Denver Colorado for 14 people. I planned ahead, and reserved rental cars through Travelocity, about a year ahead of our trip. Unfortunately, I went with Thrifty Car Rental, and here’s six reasons I came to regret that.

I’m having to post about experience here because despite me making multiple calls, in-reaches via social media, and filling out their customer survey, I have yet to hear back from Thrifty Car Rental about my experience.

So, if you’re renting a car in Denver, Colorado, and you think you may want to choose Thrifty Car Rental (perhaps it’s the cheapest option on Travelocity), here’s 6 reasons to consider going with a different company instead.

As one of my relatives explained: Yes, Thrifty Car Rental may be cheaper, but if costs you 1-3 hours of your vacation time waiting around for your car to be ready, then it’s not worth it.

1) False promises from 1-800 number and social media: I had reached out to Thrifty on the 1-800 number and via social media before the rental to ask if there was anything I could do to ensure the cars were ready.  I was coordinating 14 people flying into Denver and we counted on the cars being ready, based on the promises from both your Twitter team and the 1-800 number.   Both of them assured me they had noted it in my file, but that clearly wasn’t the case.

2) Cars were more than 90 minutes late: We had reserved two minivans for 12pm. Luckily, I was in the long line at Thrifty by 11:30. Unfortunately, neither car was ready by the time we checked out, and nobody wanted to take responsibility- I heard it was the vendor’s fault for not having the cars cleaned, etc. etc. Then I was told that having a reservation for a set time really didn’t mean anything, and I was lucky to even be getting cars at all. That’s an awfully low bar to set. 😦

3) There is NO local Denver number provided for the Thrifty Car Rental DIA location.  Why not make communication easy for your customers?

4) Oil change adds to delays: After waiting over 90 minutes for the cars, one of them got “flagged” at the exit booth (meaning we could not leave) because apparently it needed an oil change.  Thankfully a manager magically appeared (in the 90 minutes prior to that, I was unable to find any sort of manager who would take responsibility for the situation) and was able to fix this, but it added yet another 20 minute delay to the trip.

5) Desk agent tried to sneak insurance onto our bill: After an extensive conversation with the desk agent we DECLINED any extra insurance. We were very clear about this with him because I remember talking about the fact that both my sister and I have Geico.  So you can imagine my surprise when I looked at the emailed receipt and found that he had tried to add it on.  I don’t know if he is paid on commission for that, but that’s wildly unethical behavior.   Thankfully, I think the manager I spoke with after returning the cars was able to fix the problem.  

6) We also had an “extra driver” fee tacked on for one of the minivans that I had reserved.  I’m not clear how Thrifty thought I’d be able to drive two cars at the same time, so you can imagine that extra charge was also a big surprise to me.

After filling out the customer experience survey from Thrifty Car Rental, I received a one sentence email from a Hertz representative (Hertz owns Thrifty), not addressing any of these issues. I emailed him back, but never heard back.

As a general note to ALL companies. If you’re going to ask for your customer’s time to fill out a survey, it’s good business practice to actually respond to those surveys. And that doesn’t mean sending a 1 sentence response about “sorry, we’ll take this feedback into consideration.”

Have you also had a terrible rental car experience? If I were in Congress, I’d hold hearings on this yesterday. There are horror stories throughout the US of experiences like mine and it’s high time somebody held these companies to account.