I’ve been a loyal renter of cars from Budget rental car. They don’t’ have a particular set level of status, or give points, I don’t mind, I like things to stay simple. In some periods I’ve had to rent a car for work every week for 4 months. [That was my longest renting streak with Budget]. However there have been 3 major issues that I’ve had with Budget:

  1. Need to change your contract during the time you have the car? Call up Budget and you’ll be sent to sales. This is a new sales avenue for them. They will make an adjustment to the contract at a new rate and charge a fee to do this [if you prepaid].
  2. Have a misconnect or a schedule change with a flight? Despite that they work alongside the airlines, they do not acknowledge that misconnects and huge delays do happen.
  3. Mysterious dings/scratches. I returned my car in ATL last Thursday evening. A ding was found on a wheel well. [How this got there is beyond me and there was no indication of neighboring marks that would give more hints to this] The issue here is that no inspection was done after receiving the car. They agents refused to inspect the car and demanded that I sign the damage form blank. How this will be billed/handled by insurance or credit card is beyond me.

More information on the second complaint: I’ve had an issue or two where I’ve had to change my contract/arrival times with the rental company. I’ve never been able to get to local branch where I reserved my car. All of the listings for that location are SEO optimized to go to the national number, which then forwards you to sales rather than customer service. After getting tired of the whole pricing, I was told by the agent at the ROC Budget Rental company that the new price was based on “Market Demand.” That ignores the fact that by not picking up the car they now have more supply and less demand. They attempted to reprice a week long rental that was originally $172 to $530+. Finally, after threatening to cancel my reservation for next week, he made a (his words) “manual one time price fix.” I knew the market price for a last minute car rental. It was $350 via Alamo. Are they any better? We’ll see.