Orlando - Flight and Hotwire Car Rental Nightmare

Flight – Chicago to Tampa

I have found with my boys that it is beneficial to fly either really early or really late – this way they can sleep on the flight.  This worked out well with Todd, my little guy – he slept for most of the flight.  Once he woke up and started opening and closing the window shade and being generally quite loud, we were descending into Tampa anyway. 

Car rental – ugh

We were originally supposed to fly into Orlando.  At the request of the airline, we switched last minute and flew into Tampa – not that big a deal, as Tampa is about an hour or so drive to Orlando.  All we needed to do was inform our rental car company that we would be picking up our car at the  Tampa airport instead of the Orlando airport.  Easy, right?  No way, as we found out.

I booked our car through Hotwire.  As my autistic children have a very hard time with transitions, I always book with a car rental company that is in-terminal – having to take a shuttle off-site has been extremely unpleasant for us in the past.  Hotwire booked us a car with Hertz.  My husband called Hotwire from O’Hare Airport in Chicago at 6 in the morning, letting them know of our change in itinerary.  Supposedly the change was made and everything was fine.  We got to Tampa.  Went to the Hertz counter.  They had no record of us.  Call back to Hotwire.  The woman my husband spoke to earlier had switched us to another car rental company and failed to tell him this.  If we wanted to remain with Hertz, our rental price would have more than doubled.  It took three more phone calls for Hotwire to figure out what car rental place had a car for us.  Murphy’s law, it was an off-site company we had never heard of – Sixt.  Hotwire also charged us an extra $100 or so for the switch. We walked to the place where the shuttle would eventually pick us up – kids screaming the whole time.  Once we got to the Sixt office, refreshingly, the employees there were lovely, so nice to us.  They saw how tired we all were and how miserable the kids were and did their best to get us a car and get us on our way.  Hotwire is one of those things where you get what you pay for – great discounts, but if you have to change something, you’re screwed.  Lesson learned for the future: Sixt, yes.  Hotwire, never again.