Budget Truck Rental

I would give them zero stars if I could. Budget may be cheaper than U-​Haul for a cross country move, but the savings are NOT WORTH IT. Here follows my cautionary tale…
The rental itself: they force you to rent for a certain number of days for a cross country move, driving the price WAY up. In my case, for a Minneapolis to Denver (950 mile move that we ended up doing in one day to try and beat bad weather, more on that part later!), they force you to pay for five days, which is at least one day longer than strictly necessary, if not two. (Note: probably could not have done it in three days without hired help, but I totally could have afforded that if we hadn’t had to pay for extra truck days!)
Then, weeks before my rental date, I went to the business and asked to measure the cab of the vehicle since we were going to be transporting our two cats with us. After the long discussion about this, the lady there told me that there was absolutely no way under any circumstances to guarantee a certain cab size (i.e. all the cabs are different and we could have gotten stuck with a tiny one that would not have fit the cat carriers), so I was really not impressed there, although that piece ended up working out, it could have gone badly.
Then, the day of… after listening to a half hour of pointless monologue, the girl finally gives us keys to the truck, arguing with me about what my auto policy/​insurance from credit card will cover (trying to hard upsell me on the truck insurance) and threatens us that she has police pull over the trucks to make sure that the correct person is driving and will impound the truck if you switch drivers. They claim that the forced long rental is because they are SOOO concerned about your road safety, but then price gouge you for getting an extra driver, because being inconsistent appears to be their policy (note: the extra driver was my fiancé, both of us are over 25 and share the credit card we paid with, cars, and our auto insurance policy. Financially speaking, we are the same person).
Then, girl does the walkthrough of the truck in record time, neglecting our input entirely and refusing to add damages that I saw that she did not note.
Finally, moving day. Some bad weather was approaching, so we decided to try and do the entire drive in one day so we weren’t driving in the snow/​sleet. Everything went fine until the first fill up. The truck, which had a ~35 gallon tank, took about 5 gallons of gas on empty before the gas pump shut off. We tried multiple pumps and filling angles before calling for help. The gas station attendant AND the budget truck people said the same version of «this is a really common problem with budget trucks, you just need to angle the pump at weird angles and fill up bit by bit». This problem got worse with each fill up, when finally, after 16 hours in the truck, it took us 75 MINUTES standing outside in the sleet to fill the tank to ²⁄₃ full. Suffice it to say, with all of those delays, we did not beat the bad weather and were forced to weigh the consequences of spending extra money to stay overnight in a hotel and driving in possibly worse weather the next day, or continuing a drive that ultimately took 17 hours, the last 4 of which were in freezing rain with icy roads. Budget’s incompetence put us in danger.
Finally, we went to return it and found that the truck would not accept gas AT ALL. So we took it in to the return and tried to explain to the guy what was wrong with the truck, and it turns out he is the only one working, so he can’t leave to verify that the gas tank is broken. Budget has this policy that if you return the tank not full, they will charge you for not only the refill at some exorbitant rate (like 40c per gallon over market price), but also a convenience fee on top. We are reasonable people and were of course willing to pay for the fuel we used (in spite of the pain and suffering caused by this stupid truck!), but we certainly don’t want to be charged the convenience fee, because it is surely not our fault that the truck is broken. We call Budget customer service and roadside assistance, and they refuse to help us, and offer such helpful tidbits as «if you had asked us on the road, we could have come with a new truck and traded you». Mind you, this would have come with a wait time of 2 – 3 hours, plus all of our possessions were in the back of the truck, and the weather was getting worse.
They refused to close out our bill with us there since we couldn’t fill the gas tank, and instead we are subject to the mercy of whatever the guy says re: gas tank broken or not, and damages. And of course, we would be charged the convenience fee. We spent over two hours on the phone with customer service, where they transferred us five times, and hung up on us thrice. We tried to let Budget do the right thing… multiple extra, un-​agreed upon charges showed up on our card, so we gave up and ended up disputing the extra charges with Amex.
BUYER BEWARE