Advantage Reviews 185

Do not use this company, especially at Denver Airport, i did not realise Sharks could get so far inland.

After a long flight from London, we were duped into paying an extra $400 for an unnecessary upgrade.

We booked a Toyota RAV4 for a month to go skiing, the very well trained extortionist informed us that their RAV4’s are only 2 wheel drive, surely that should be a RAV2 I asked, he then said he would not hire us our booked and paid (£650) for car and said we would need an AWD and if we did not like it we could go away as he had other customers waiting.

Anyway after a great trip to Colorado and Utah I have contacted my credit card company who are looking into this sharp practice.

I don’t understand why companies carry out such practices, as we’ll never use them again, don’t use HolidayAutos.com either, as their “customer services” condone what Advantage are up to.

Advantage car rental in Orlando, was exceptional with my reservation. We had a 50 hours delayed, because of tecnical problems in my plane, and they were great mantaining our reservations.
Also, all the employees were very nice.
Europcar have a great partner in USA!!! Congrats!!!
Jorge Macedo e Teresa Silva

Avoid them if you can, pay a little bit extra and go with other rental providers. I used them for a week’s car rental in washington DC, I regret not searching their reviews online prior to making the reservation. The trouble started as soon as we arrived at the airport. Followed the sign for car rental pickups and there were no sign post for Advantage pickup. So we ended up calling them asking for directions (had to pay for using phone abroad). Finally when we got there, we waited for a bit to be served. Overheard the conversation of the rental people at the desk serving the customer in the queue ahead of me, he was really trying hard to sell the excess insurance.
Anyways when I was served I was told the car I reserved is small and I should go for an upgrade. Initially booked nissan but was provided yonda, it was perfect size for us three. If you know what you booked then stick to your decision.
Then he asked if I need collision damange waiver and excess insurance said no, cause I have a separate worldwide excess cover with a UK insurer. Asked me to sign in his electronic signing machine that only displays the space for your signature. I wanted to read the contral he said he will email it to me. But I never got it!
Then tried to sell their toll pass thing which would cost you $15 everyday regardless of how many times you use it or do not use it. Declined as I rented car in US before and used the cash tolls and paid bills online later after the trip. And also since we had no intension of making long road trip while we were there we were not convinced paying the $90 extra fees. I think Hertz charge you $5 for somehing similar with a maximum of $25/$30 per rental. We were not told anything else at the counter and the tolling system or pay by plate was not explained to us.
They gave us a paper of the car that had the condition noted in their minor scratches and fair wear and tear and asked us to go an inspect the car ourselves in the dark. Which we did signed and off we go. Apart from the car’s suspion being really bad it was ok, and since we didnt use every single day we didnt care too much about the suspension either. But we did feel every bumps on the road.
We returned the car in the same condition as we picked it up and checked if I need to sign off anything. They said its all done an email will be sent to my address. So checked my email when I got back home from holiday found two emails from them in my mailbox one was for a survey they other one was the invoice. It had an incorrect postal address so emailed them asking to correct it and to forward any toll charges to the right address.
After a month I see a $66 bill on my credit card so i sent them an email requesting breakdown of the toll charges. They completely ignored my email. Then I sent another follow up email, with no avail. Then I rang them up (again paying extra for international calls) finally got hold of someone at their end and he told me you have two toll charges and $50 in administration fees and at that point I was feeling livid. Because first of all no one explained about the administration fee by the desk and I never received my rental agreement via email till that date. I sent them another email that I need to see a copy of my rental agreement and the toll charges details or I will dispute the credit card payment. So finally they sent me those files.

Long and behold just underneath the two optional extras initial I found five other terms and conditions wording in the contract. Two of them was particularly bothering road side service plan and tolls. I asked them about the road side breakdown assistance and whether it was included and they gave me a number for it, this is something I always check just to be on the safe side. But never explained that i am liable to pay it, even though i didn’t need it but I should be made aware of it. Next the tolls, I was aware I declined to pay for E-Z toll but wasn’t told or explained this clause that bothers me “any manned or unmanned toll that you violate during the rental period will result in a $25 administrative fee per toll violation. To me, violate means willfully deciding not to pay — to blow through a tollbooth.”

But I didn’t willfully commit any toll violations I used toll roads that didn’t have any booths, not realizing that doing so without a payment device would incur a penalty. There was no opportunity to pay! Also I didn’t authorise them to take the payment from my credit card without my acknowledgment.

All in all its not worth it to me to drag this any further regarding the fees and I don’t care about the charges but the whole experience of handling this rental was quite shocking to me and a learning curve. The were the worst car rental company I used to date and I have used many. So if you decide to rent with them ask then to print the contract out for you and read it before you sign it on the day. And yeah they will ignore your emails if you are nice and kind and polite. I will never use them again.

Bad company.
Poor quality service.
I've paid for sunpass and it doesn’t work. Avoid it if you're clever.

When I picked up my car it was dirty and the screen wash was empty. I declined the "Sunpass" toll charge, but on my last day of a four week holiday in Orlando I passed a toll booth and went in to pay but was advised my Sunpass was "activated and had paid, when I arrive at the Airport I spoke to the agent who said not to worry, on arrival home I had a charge of $43.51 for using it once. You cannot see the "Sunpass" sender as it is behind the sun-visor. If you can us another rental company please do.
I will never use them again.

Avoid this company unless you are willing to accept poor service, overbooking their cars where you may not get any car that you paid for in advance, long lines/cues, poor customer service, customer service not knowledgeable about their products, etc

We dealt with an individual named marc(manager of the Austin office). They put our friend with cystic fibrosis life at risk by renting us a vehicle that had no external power for an 8 hour trip. I highly recommend not doing business with advantage. We put together events for terminally sick kids and they rented us a vehicle that had no internal power and achieved 7 miles per Gallon when they told us it was 18 mpg. When trying to deal with the situation marc said that he didn't want to deal with giving us a proportionate refund simply because " he didn't want to".

Despite the long time we had to wait before we had got the car I recommend advantage at JFK New York. Great car great price and no difficulties with price or dammages. Very friendly employee who explained everything perfect.I would certainly rent there again.

Do not rent from Advantage. My husband suffered a medical emergency while we were on vacation in Hawaii (Oahu) and I was told they wouldn't charge me for the extra driver. They charged me! and then when the accident occurred I called their claims office 10 times in the first two days. They never called back! I then proceeded to try and call another 4 times. I still as of today have never received a call after even calling customer service who by the way gave me the direct number to claims that was based in Orlando, Florida. Hello! They are having a hurricane. Very poor service!

I rented a car at JFK airport in New York for 23 days. Good and new car. Friendly and responsive staff, especially Miriam and Lynnette))) 👍🏽

Left four voicemails in the span of a month at phone numbers given to my by CarRentals.com or Advantage representatives. Never received a single call back. Called the facility out of Boston repeatedly, and at differing hours of the day, but the lines "were busy" each and every time. It is almost as if they could care less; hardly ever treated with such blatant lack of care or concern for customer service. Should have used a real car rental company such as Hertz or Enterprise. Those companies at least have legitimate customer service representatives and avenues for recourse. When someone is travelling from across the country, uncertainty with the rental car is absolutely the last issue needed.

I am a person who does a lot of due diligence whenever I do anything. Accordingly I made inquiries of the rental company BEFORE I booked the car. Specifically I asked if they accepted debit cards & what was the amount that would be held on the car; as is the usual practice in the industry. I was informed, on 2 different calls w/one of their agents (one of which was a conference call with my traveling companion) that an amount between $150-$200 would be held in addition to the actual cost of the car. As you know there are many people who are traveling EXTREMELY tight & exact budgets. We are among those people. We made sure that the card that we were using had the amount for the card + an extra $200 for the hold. When we went to pick up the car we were then informed that $150-$200 was the hold placed on credit cards. For debit cards they hold $350! (Sidebar: we had a previous, similar bad experience w/Advantage Rental Cars & vowed never to use them again. So we were horrified when we found out that EZ Rental Cars was actually Advantage!) We asked for a manager who apologized but said there was nothing that he could do. He told us that that was "building policy," meaning that all the rental agencies had the same policy. He suggested that we use Uber. We explained that we were there for a convention and had to get back and forth from the hotel to the arena on a daily basis, so that was not feasible. He told us that the only other company there that accepted rentals was Payless. But, again, they would say the same thing. We had to be at an orientation meeting by 1:00 on Thursday. We landed @11:54. So, as you can well imagine, this whole ordeal was making us very frustrated & very late. We took a chance and went to Payless who promptly gave us a car @the same rate & without any other complications. We told them what happened & they told us that they were constantly remedying renters' issues that had initially booked with Advantage. So I will rate my car rental experience with Payless Rental Cars as A+, stellar, fantastic, awesome, will use them from now on & recommend them to any & everyone. As for Advantage/EZ you should NEVER use them. They give bad/incorrect information when asked & then do nothing on the day to assist the renter in remedying the situation.

I booked an Advantage Rent A Car rental car via "pay now" on CarRentals.com and made a minor mistake - I had put Thursday instead of Wednesday on the pickup day. I immediately noticed the mistake and called Advantage, where the representative said I had to email CarRentals.com.

When I explained the problem by email, they said that I had to either pay them $50 to cancel or book a new non-refundable reservation, which would mean paying them another $200 after already paying them $185, and then request a cancellation of the original reservation to get the $185 back. All this so I could add one day to my reservation!

Our service with Advantage was very good. The problem comes when using an online booking service. We were unfortunate to have used carrental8.com
Advantage employees were friendly and helpful. Our car was new. They charged us only for the time we had the vehicle. However we were left feeling violated by carrental8.com
Later we learned by our own research it would have been cheaper to reserve directly with Advantage. We pre-purchased our fuel at the rental counter, cheaper than local gas prices. Brought the car back on fumes without any additional cost.
We will never reserve with another online 3rd party booking agency again. Thanks for the great service Advantage, we will do business again.

I'm sure the joke has been made before: Advatage is the rental company that likes to take Advantage of you. While recently dropping off my car at Newark Airport, I realized once there I forgot to fill up with gas before dropping off my car, an honest mistake. I asked if I could leave the grounds to go fill up the car with 9 gallons of gas. Nope. Once you're on the property you can't leave. And then they charge you $8.99 a gallon to fill up, a 540% mark up from what gas cost at the time (about a $1.55-$1.69), resulting in an additional charge of nearly $100 on my weekend rental. What's worse is the service that followed - charge immediately went to my CC, and nobody inside seemed to care about a first time customer's experience. I even wrote into their customer support when I got home, waited a few weeks, and got crickets.

$4.99 seems like a more appropriate figure for a marked-up gallon of gas, $8.99 is pure price gouging.

Next time I would rather go to a reputable rental car company with better customer support. Renter beware.

Advantage - Las Vegas Macarran Airport

This company is a joke - we booked a car in advance and arrived in the middle of the night - NO CARS AVAILABLE! How is that possible when they know we will come and pick up the booked AND prepaid car??

It is close to what you could describe as fraud - to sell something you dont even have.

They asked us to show up the day after in a taxi - and when we came the day after, they STILL had no car.

They told us they could not refund the taxi ride, even though they asked us to bring receipts and they would refund - suddenly we would have to file a complaint with the head office in order to get something back.

I have never experienced customer service this bad and rude!

We reserved with Advantage, arrived a bit early. Amazingly, no cars in our class available, but we can upgrade for another $10 per day. Really......When we walk out to get our car in another hour, there will be plenty. Obviously a play for money. We are willing to pay for another hour, but want the car we reserved. If you are late, they penalize you. Poor customer service.

Worst experience ever in renting a car in Venice, Italy. Arrogant people, trying to get all the money they can from you. Client Service is a mess.

What is this company ?!!

Over the past years we have rented more than 25 cars from different companies, but this was the first and very last time we rented from Advantage!!
We rented the car in January 2013 from Nice Airport.
First of all the rental company was difficult to find, and not placed together with all the other rental companies.
When we received the papers from the rental company our first bad experiences began:
We were informed that we would receive the car with a full tank, and that we should return it with a tank as empty as possible, as we would have to pay for a full tank afterwards - at a fixed price higher than we could have filled it up for ourselves!! And as we had only rented the car for 5 days we only used 2/3 of the fuel, but had to pay for a full tank!
Furthermore we were informed, that if we returned the car dirty inside (which was explained to us as full of garbage etc.) there would be an additional cleaning fee of 15€
When we received the car it appeared to have covered more than 60.000 km.
The outside of the car was full of dents and scracthes. Inside the car we found dirty seats, and on the passenger seat there was a hole burned by a cigarette. We complained to rental company, but they just made a note in their papers about it.
When we made the first stop, we also found out that the hinge for the glove box was broken, and so was the hinge for the hat shelf!
When we returned the car after 5 days, we were very careful that the car was completely empty and with no dirt anywhere.
Nevertheless we were charged 15€ for cleaning on the invoice. I refused to pay that, an they removed the "cleaning line" on the invoice, and I accepted (as they had my credit card informations the amount would be charged automaticly)
After having argued with the guys in the rental office, I was a bit in a hurry to catch my flight, so what I did not see, was that they had NOT changed the final amount!! - so the final result was:
At Advantage we ended up paying about 20% more for and old faulty car, than we would normally have paid at any other rental company for a nice new car!!!

We rented the car through Rental Cars. As written below they will ripp you off in any way they can. We paid way ower the local price for the fuel and you have to pay for a full tank. Also the collision damage waiver only cowered scratches. So we had to pay an extra 42 euros for the insurance.