Alamo Rent A Car

I am sad to report a one star rating, because when I first rented the car it was seamless and the manager was very pleasant. Unfortunately, the car broke down and left me on the side of the road!!! This was not only awful because it was a cold rainy day, but because I was on the way to meet my family at my father’s gravesite. I never made it. How do you compensate a person for missing this, as well as half a travel day while you wait to be towed in the cold? You get told that Hotwire is responsible.
Then you contact Hotwire and they tell you Alamo is responsible. In the end I experienced a complete run around with nothing solved. I was disheartened and disappointed. How far a small gesture could have gone. I don’t understand how companies think this is good customer service or how they expect repeat business. In an era with so many competing companies, good service goes a loooong way!

Going to keep this short.
Richard Williams — a gentleman who helped me select my rental — gets 5 stars. I promised I would let people know how great he was/​is. Thank you, Richard! You were a pleasant surprise.
The car itself gets 3 stars. The hood wasn’t closed and it almost flew up as I traveled down BW Parkway. Little freaky.

My story is I recently returned a car, 7/​23, and I accidentally left my iPhone in the car on the center console with the charger plugged in, since I was using it as navigation. When I returned the car, your employee just took the car without even checking if any items were left behind, especially one so obviously left on the center console. I can back to the facility 20 minutes later realizing I didn’t have my phone, and talked to the Manager. He however couldn’t do anything but allow me to borrow a computer to see if I can use the find my iPhone app, which is better than nothing. But by that time my phone was turned off/​disabled so the app wouldn’t work.
What I found disturbing is he said he didn’t know who handled the car, and didn’t have cameras around the return area. I find this lack of process and control disturbing. Ideally any established company with set procedures should know who handled what, and would of been able to narrow down the list of people who could of taken the iPhone.
Unfortunately I had to take a flight out and didn’t have time to involve the police.

Running off of
, I was able to find a car for four days for $ 13.95 a day, add on taxes and extra insurance coverage and the whole experience cost me about $ 130. While I was at the airport car pickup location they offered me all sorts of upgrades for $ 10 more a day with SUVs, sports cars, and convertibles but I took a pass since I really didn’t feel like paying a dollar more. The process was seamless and when I went to the lot the attendants pointed me to whatever car I wanted to pick in the compact section.
I picked some manner or Ford, the first time I’ve ever driven a Ford and found the car very clean with the proverbial new car smell. The buttons on the car were like any other car except that the gas tank had no secure mechanism, meaning if someone really wanted to, they could pop that thing open and pour in a sack of sugar to render the car useless. Anyway, free of those concerns, I turned on the GPS and headed out to my next location.
Over the next few days, I bonded with the car and learned all of its various features. The only real problem I had with the car was its total lack of horse power. Baltimore is a very hilly city with ups and downs and I found going up hills or accelerating from 50 to 60mph required hitting the pedal much harder than other cars I’ve driven. Granted, you get what you pay for so it wasn’t that big of a nuisance.
The only other problem I had with the Alamo Rental Car location was in returning the car. I got back to the airport lot and had to drive over spikes to get the car back to the lot! It freaked me out to drive over spikes and I had to ask the desk attendant what was up with driving over spikes and potentially resulting in SEVERE car damage! I returned the car and life returned to normal.