I wonder if others have experienced this problem. Normally, my wife and I have few issues come up when travelling in Europe these days. GPS and better communication has made travelling there so much easier then when we started doing this decades ago. But one problem persists. When dropping a car off in another city after our touring, it is often impossible to get any information about exactly WHERE you should park the car at the car rental location if the car rental office is at, say, a train station. Mostly, this is a non-issue, in that the logical spot is in front of the car rental office. But on occasion, this is impossible to do. The office is inside a train station terminal with no parking in front, for example. These offices clearly have a locale elsewhere to pick up and evidently drop off cars. For whatever reason, trying to convey this concern to the company either on-line or when picking the car up is often met with a kind of bewilderment by the other person, who often say they have no idea, or just tell you that you give the keys to the other office and they magically will somehow find your car, covered in parking tickets, just outside a "Do Not Enter" sign in a loading zone. Not that that ever happened.
Posted by
Pensacola
9110 posts
Often, especially in the larger cities, there's a sign for the rental outfit on a nearby public parking garage. Go in there and you'll be able to figure it out. Otherwise, double park or whatever it takes in front of the office, walk in, and hand them the keys.
Posted by
OP
Sacramento, California, United States
253 posts
LOL! First off, we like to drop off rental cars in smaller towns (not tiny, just not as big as larger venues) with train access, instead of driving in crowded bigger cities, which is not much fun. I am laughing because this obvious solution gets shot down when the office has no one there and no obvious key drop. The attendant in one instance was on a 1 and 1/2 hour coffee break and this after we had called ahead and told the office we would be returning a car during a certain time frame that was during their posted office hours. In that instance, my wife was driving, left me at the office and she had to drive off because no parking was handy and you could not linger. Then she could not figure out how to get back to the station (I navigate for her). She finally returned only to learn I had not found anything out about where to leave the car. We finally found the lot on our own, but still had the keys, which we left with another car agency. But we had to wait for another train.