SFO Rental Car Center — Local services in San Bruno

the SFO car rental building has one of the stupidest passenger flow designs I’ve ever seen.

if you’re taking the train from the airport, it’s the only station where doors open on both sides. if you get out on the right side, you’re right inside the building and the car rental queues are right in front of you. fantastic!

if, however, you get out on the left side (which you might do since there’s no signage or notice telling you to choose right) you exit onto the platform, have to descend to ground level, exit the station, and enter the car rental building from ground level. then, when you look for the up escalators, you won’t find any: they’re only descending. literally no ascending escalators in the entire building. it’s very long, and you see escalators on both sides, so you walk a fair bit trying to figure this out. eventually you stumble towards the elevators (which are hidden behind a door that says “for gold + preferred members”) and try each floor in succession, getting very excited when you find your car rental company then realizing it’s the wrong queue so you have to go all the way to the top again, and in the mean time 3 other trains of people have arrived and the queues each extend far past the ropes desperately trying to corral people into a semblance of order.

based on the length of the above paragraph, it’s not difficult to assume which one happened to me.

rating 2 stars because my issues were partially due to my own ineptitude but mostly because of...

I've used this rental car center with multiple rental car companies over a span of 12 years: Hertz, Budget, Avis, Enterprise, etc. The only redeeming thing I can say is that a customer eventually gets a rental car. Other than that, it's awful. I don't say that because of a single bad experience but rather the sum of bad experiences over the years with commonalities. Observations:

None of the companies are adequately staffed in person to process the queues in an expeditious way. Even with the loyalty program or using the mobile application or being one of the "preferred customers," it's not a guarantee to be able to go directly to the lot to get the car. Everything operates at a glacial pace. A warning: your time is not valued here.

By and large, the companies have not hired particularly motivated or talented staff. I fully appreciate that this is a thankless job, but these people couldn't give a hoot. The last thing I want to do is land and deal with a staff member who's clearly a sophomoric teenager without an iota of professionalism. Pay these folks a good wage and hold them to a good standard.

The airtrain takes an eternity to bring a passenger from the airport to the rental car center.

Getting a rental car doesn't have to be bad. I've gotten rental cars in other American cities and elsewhere in the world, but the SFO rental car center takes the cake. I'd rather wait in line for an appointment at a California DMV than deal with...

We used Thrifty. The lines were long and slow moving. After getting to the counter, the car wasn't ready. We were told to wait nearby and our name would be called, with no indication of how long the wait would be. After waiting for an hour and a half, we went back in the line to wait again and figure out what was going on.

We were told that our car was in fact ready, but nobody had notified us when it was ready, so out day's plans were wasted.

This happened to others as well in the line. Total chaos. When we arrived a customer who was leaving yelled, "good luck everyone", which should have been our first indication that this is very poorly run.

There was no apology for wasting our day, and in fact we were told that we should not have done exactly what the staff member told us to do. A different staff member said this wasn't right, but we were told to speak to the original person who processed our reservation.

Plan at least 90 minutes for a pre-reserved car. Our noon reservation got us a...