“Dear PoPville,
Over the past few years, I have attempted to reserve a car from the Hertz/Dollar location at Union Station 6 times. Of those attempts, only 2 were successful, but only after being wait-listed for like half a day. The other 4 times, I either cancelled my plans or scrambled for a last-minute alternative.
Here is how it works:
1. You book your reservation and receive a confirmation email. (All set, right?)
2. You arrive to pick up the car at the scheduled time and find yourself entering an angry mob of people who have reservations, but no cars.
3. When you finally make it to the window, you are ultimately given no other option than writing your name and phone number on a piece of scratch paper and hope they might call you back. (Call their number and you get, “I’m sorry, an error has occured”).
The takeaway is that if you are in DC and need to rent a car or if you have folks coming into town that need to do so, you should consider rentals here to systemically unreliable. They routinely overbook and leave their front-line employees to manage the justifiably angry scrum.”