Sometimes, when you get to the car rental counter of your chosen car rental company, you can find a number of people queuing, and only a couple of advisers available to help.
This can be so frustrating, particularly after your 10-hour flight and your hour getting through immigration and waiting for your bags to come through on the carousel.
So, a way around this is to join the rental car company’s loyalty program (such as Avis Preferred or SIXT’s Advantage Circle) – all of which are free to join – and then skip the car rental counter completely and go straight to the car garage, where you’ll still have some paperwork to sign, but the queues, if any, will be much shorter.
If you booked your car rental directly with the car rental company (rather than a broker), then adding your loyalty program membership details to your booking is easy – just call or email the car rental company.
If you booked through a broker, then it can be a little trickier to get your loyalty details added to your booking. But it’s worth trying through the broker initially or, failing that, contact the car rental company directly.
This is not guaranteed to work (and we’ve had mixed success), but worth trying – and maybe try using the loyalty program’s alternative (and usually shorter) queue at the car rental customer desk.
Anything to avoid a queue!
