A U-haul manager shared with us his tips for having a better experience when you rent with them:
- Book well in advance( at least a week) with a MAJOR credit card
- If you reserve through the 1800 number, get your reservation number and call back a day or 2 before to find where to pick up your equipment. Do not wait for someone to call you.
- When you pick up, bring your drivers license and credit or debit card. It makes things easier for everyone.
- If you know a location that you prefer to pickup or drop off, let uHaul or the dealer know.
- Take the insurance, but only if you are not covered by your auto policy. No credit card will cover damage.
What about all those tales about broken and poorly maintained trucks? His thoughts, inside…
“I have read many of the horror stories on the web and consumerist, and have this to say… Every situation is different, when you get a good or bad experience it can be isolated to a single person or location. We think we have a partnership with Uhaul, we let them repair the equipment, we take care of the customers. Speaking for our location, I honestly never want to send someone out on a rental if I feel the equipment is unsafe, and with our primary business, there is NEVER a need to lie or treat people poorly.
“Overall, their equipment is in much better shape than when we were a dealer a few years ago, we are contributing to our bottom line with their product on our lot, and I would not say they are a bad company. Their software could use some streamlining and their intractable attitude as well.”
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i used to work for uhaul. anytime the trailers would come back with any defective lighting, i would rewire the whole trailer. car dollys were great. one comes back with a broken wheel cover i would redo the whole trailer. i had a customer wait on me to finish fixing one so he could rent it, her even let me test the lights out on his vehicle when i was finished.
Stay far away from U-Haul. Last time I used them I made the mistake of relying on them for a truck on my moving day…and I had to move that very day, with no buffer time.
I get to the office – I had reserved the truck at the office – and guess what, no truck. “The guys came in yesterday with no reservation and needed a truck, and they said they would have it back by 9am.” (This was 8:55am.)
Lo and behold, the two self-absorbed morons who rented the truck showed up with it at 11am. The truck died as it pulled in because there was no gas in the truck left. We sat and waited AN HOUR for the attendant to go over the truck, clean it out (there was wet soggy mess inside) and head down to the gas station two miles away to get a gallon of gas, and come back. By this point, half my moving day was gone, and I was leaving my family in the lurch without a truck.
So once we got the truck, it wouldn’t go over 30 mph and had 275K miles on it.
I refused to pay for the truck when I returned it. I eventually got a hold of some higher-ups and had them pay for every cent of my gas, too.
The previous time I rented from them: I chose the location where I wanted to pick up, halfway between my move from PA to NJ, and they called to tell me that the rental truck was moved 50 miles to the north, completely out of my way. I had them reimburse for the extra mileage. Not to mention this truck had 300K+ miles on it and wouldn’t go above 55…and we were on the PA and NJ turnpikes!
Never again, U-Haul. A trashy, completely unreliable company. One of the worst, if not the worst, in America.
How are Enterprise and Lowes at their rent-a-truck/van programs? I intend to rent from one of them if I need a pickup for a day to haul something large and the friend whose mom has a Tundra can’t help, or mom and her CR-V can’t help, and whatever I’m hauling can’t fit in my VW GTI with the seats folded down.
I’ve had mostly good experiences with U-Haul. All of my one-way moves have been in good equipment — in one case I actually got a brand new truck with 300 miles on the odometer.
My in-town moves have been a more mixed experience. I suspect when they have a truck that’s too worn-out to make it across the country anymore, they make it an in-town truck. That said, I’ve gotten good service from my local franchise. On one occasion I had reserved a 14′ truck, but they didn’t have it because that truck had suffered a transmission failure the previous day. Not only did they set me up with a 17′ truck instead, they gave it to me at the same price as the 14′ *and* gave me a credit for the extra gas I’d use driving the bigger truck. I call that good customer service.
@Buran: One issue with companies like Enterprise is they usually won’t let you tow anything. If you don’t need to tow a car or a trailer with the truck, and you don’t need a one-way rental, then it’s probably all right.
I will say I’ve never rented a car from Enterprise and found the car I’d reserved actually there, but that’s true of every car rental company I’ve dealt with. I now always reserve the cheapest car possible because I know they almost certainly won’t have it and will bump me up to something bigger for free.
Funny thing is I rented a U-Haul truck this past weekend, and booked in advance online.
Their website will charge you a $5 convenience fee, just like Ticketmaster does (as explained by the person working the U-Haul store counter), that will not count towards your rental fees.
The person working the counter told me to never book online, unless I wanted to waste $5, and to just go to the center.
My one UHaul rental started with the only available on a July 4th weekend had a broken A/C. In Texas. We went to the next closest UHaul, had to get a 20 ft truck, since it was all they had. The same time we were picking it up, another couple was in the office complaining about how they’d reserved a 24 ft truck for that morning.
One other consumer hint they forgot: If possible, don’t rent at the end/beginning of the month, especially holidays (July 4th, etc). That’s when most people are moving in and out, since leases are monthly. When we moved into our house from an apartment, I made sure to overlap my lease with the closing date by a week.
I rented from UHaul recently. The rep leaned on me really hard to get the insurance, and (inaccurately) assured me that my auto insurance would not cover a truck. Really didn’t want to take ‘No’ for an answer. The check engine light was on, and it was pretty beat up, but it got the job done.
I’d say that all truck rentals have the same good/bad points. I just rented a truck from Budget. I did the online reservation 2 days in advanced for a 10 ft truck. When I showed up (on time) to pick up my truck, the guy informed me that they didn’t have any 10 ft trucks to rent. So they gave me a 16 ft truck for the price of a 10 ft.
The good thing, was that it was a brand new truck. It had a little over a 100 miles on the odometer. The bad thing, was that I really didn’t want to drive such a large vehicle, especially in city traffic. Overall, the experience was average. Even though I got the free upgrade, I wish they had actually had a 10 ft truck ready for me.
@sirwired is right.. online reservations are a joke. The only thing it reserves is, your first pick of whatever truck is on the lot that morning.
@thirdbase:
More like the Radio Shack.
I doubt U-haul would still exist if Penske and Ryder had a presence in smaller cities (if you aren’t near a city of 100,000 people or larger, you can pretty much forget using them).
@Buran: The only vehicles we’ve ever rented with Enterprise were cargo vans. They’ve always been available to us on time. They’ve always been in good condition and Enterprise has never substituted it for something else. At the locations we rented from, cargo van was the biggest thing they had. The lack of something bigger was a feature for us because we did not want them to give us something bigger with the pretense that they were giving us more for the same price.
Just about every single time we rented with U-Haul, they pulled that switcheroo crap on us. In their head, they were giving us a freebie by giving us something bigger than we reserved but we had to pay more gas and got headaches with finding parking or driving the vehicle in tight spaces so for us it was no freebie at all but a huge pain in the ass.
Oh my where can I start?
Same as what others say – #6 – ANYBODY ELSE.
I was in a co-op program and had to move every 6 months for 3 years, plus another 2 or 3 around it. That’s 6 moves in a 3 year window. And not once did I have a good experience with U-Haul. However, they were the only game in town. Like somebody else said – their concept of a reservation is your spot in the bitch-line. Not once did they actually have what I had reserved. And I was so young and stupid that I had them install a hitch on my car once – took over three hours, the guy had busted at least two drill bits on my bumper, and they drilled into my spare tire (smooooth).
@lowlight69: Agreed, 100%. I’ve *never* known anyone personally who has had a good experience with U-Haul.
I’ve rented from them a couple of times, and both were unpleasant experiences for reasons that others have given (dirty truck, bait-and-switch on price, awful service, tricky day-counting to overcharge, etc.). But considering what others have gone through I consider myself lucky. I had an old roommate who got a truck with no emergency break, which is deadly in San Francisco. Finally, another old roommate had his breaks fail in his U-Haul, and he has pins in his body to this day from the accideent. The only consolation is that I think he got a good settlement from his lawsuit.
After my second bad experience I’ve sworn off U-Haul and only use Penske, Hengehold, or Home Depot.
My tip for happier renting at U-Haul — rent from someone else.
Thank god for the Consumerist. I last rented Uhaul some twenty years ago – don’t recall many details, but I do remember it was a junky old truck.
After reading this article and the last one, it’s pretty apparent that you may even be safer walking into a “Best” Buy than renting from Uhaul – THAT’S pretty damn bad!
“…with our primary business, there is NEVER a need to lie or treat people poorly.”
Implying that they DO need to lie and treat people poorly in other aspects of their business?
As a former reservations agent at U-haul’s corporate office, I can tell you that this manager’s tips are of negligible value. Booking in advance with a credit card does not mean that you will get a truck. The computer system does not track inventory in any way and agents will continue to make reservations until a general region is flagged as having limited equipment (which is a pretty rare occurrence- at that point, they will charge you a fee to be put on a waiting list and tell you that you will be called on the day of your move when equipment becomes available. Don’t hold your breath waiting on that.)
The manager is right about never waiting to be called. I used to hear all day long: “The regional office never called me…” Be aware that making the call yourself doesn’t mean that your equipment is going to be remotely close to the pickup time or location that you wanted; you’ll just have more time to cope with matters if your plans go totally awry.
Knowing a location where you prefer to pick up is useless when calling the 800 number. The agents will make note of your preference, but note that it is “a preference only”. If the equipment doesn’t happen to be dropped off there, they will send you miles and miles away, if need be. Your drop off location is usually wherever you choose in your destination city, because… no inventory tracking!
My advice- go directly to your local dealer to make arrangements. Do not call the 800 number, or use the website to make reservations under any circumstances.
Oh, the horror stories I could tell Consumerist from my time spent sitting in that dismal gray office with a busted phone and ancient computer…
Based on personal experience with the thieving scumbags at U-hell (who intentionally overbook their trucks and then simply show their middle fingers to all the folks who thought they had a binding contract) I’d recommend that you never, Ever, EVER consider entertaining even the wispiest notion of a hint of thought of renting from them.
I mean it. Seriously. No kidding. Never…