Budget Rental Car Issues-DO NOT USE BUDGET

[GaryJ407015]

We recently (October 2023) rented a car through Budget because of the discount and relationship Budget has with AARP. We would NOT recommend using Budget and we will NOT use Budget ourselves in the future. We rented an SUV for our trip to the national parks in Utah and the Grand Canyon. We prepaid so we could receive the discounted price. We planned to pick up the SUV at the airport in Salt Lake City and return it to the airport in Phoenix. After making the reservation we later called to request a 4WD SUV and was told that they would do their best to have a 4WD vehicle for us when we arrived. When we arrived at the airport in Salt Lake City we were told that they were working on locating a car for us. They didn't have any vehicles available. At one point they offered us a sedan even though I had requested and PREPAID for a 4WD SUV. It took over 2 hours for us to finally receive a vehicle. One of the Budget employees told us that Budget will over book and often they don't have enough vehicles on-sight to fulfill all of the reservations. We were also told that it was going to take longer to provide us with a vehicle because ours was a one way rental even though our rental was always one way, we prepaid and we reserved the vehicle almost a year ago. 

We will NOT rent from Budget again. We hope that AARP re-evaluates their relationship with Budget. We only rented from Budget because of that relationship and the discount we received as AARP members but the negative experience was not worth the money we saved. 

[MariamaA859467]

Hi there, here to help! We certainly understand your concern regarding the AARP Car Rental Services provided by Budget. We would be glad to work with the Escalation team at Budget to have this investigated for you. If you are still having difficulties with Budget, please either give us a call at 1-888-OUR-AARP (1-888-687-2277) to request an Escalation or send me a private message in the AARP Online Community by clicking this link and entering my username, “AARPMariamaA” into the “Send to” box https://community.aarp.org/t5/notes/composepage . Please provide the following details in your message:

• Full name
• AARP Membership # (or home address)
• Phone # and email address to contact you
• Description of your issue

We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate you informing us of your concern. We look forward to hearing from you soon!