It's not just local rentals that are having problems. I recently arrived at a medium sized airport with a sedan booking and found nothing but pickup trucks waiting for me. I tried to resolve the matter but the app and kiosk were useless for resolving problems. The only human around was running a check-out booth for five different marquees and didn't seem to have the ability or motivation to address my issue. After running out of options and knowing that agencies sometimes share fleets I ended up taking a car from the wrong group and hoped for the best. On the return there were no penalty charges or change fees but it took them over 30-minutes to print a receipt showing I had returned with a full tank and no damage. It doesn't seem to matter whether I choose door one (Avis/Budget), door two (Enterprise/National/Alamo), or door three (Hertz/Dollar/Thrifty). I've never used Payless, Sixt, or Fox because online reviews and word of mouth was so negative they honestly sounded more like a mafia shakedown than a legitimate rental business.
I can beat that story. Once I rode the Silver Meteor to Savannah, took a taxi to the airport where I (well, our agency travel software) had reserved a rental car. It's kind of weird, on a Wednesday morning at about 7:30 AM, the Savannah airport is reminiscent of a mausoleum.
I found the rental counter (due to agency policy, we were required to use the cheapest car rental quote we could get, I'll leave out the name of the rental company to protect the guilty), and lo and behold, my car's not ready! I'd have to wait, like an hour and a half. I mean, I had made this reservation weeks ago, and I was the first customer of the day, heck, there are no other customers, what do you mean there are no cars available?
But there were cars available at the other companies. But if I did that, it wasn't what the travel authorization specified, so maybe I wouldn't get reimbursed. (Did I mention how happy I am that I'm retired and don't have to deal with this stuff any more?)
I called my boss, which wasn't as bad a move as it sounds, because he was already at the office, so it wasn't like I was dragging him out of bed or something. He didn't have an answer to my question -- could I still be reimbursed if I used another rental car company? But then, the clerk at the original company, who had undoubtedly overheard me calling to see if I could arrange a rental with competition, called me over, and it seemed that somehow, magically, my car was ready.
Well, that was that, and I happily motored off to my day's activities, enjoying the almost total lack of traffic on the approach roads to the Savannah airport.