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What I needed this past weekend was a rental truck to move my belongings from a three bedroom townhome to my new single family home in the SF Bay Area. I would need a truck large enough to load all large furniture and a majority of the bags and boxes of odds and ends. I decided to rent a 17 foot UHaul truck. In short, I found UHaul’s website very user friendly, unfortunately the actual reservation was a major letdown. UHaul’s $50 Reservation Guarantee is a scam. Additional, the agreed upon reservations time was delayed an hour. On a positive note, the truck was in good running order. Now for my review of UHual Truck Rental.
UHaul’s Reservation System (3 out of 5 Stars)
The UHaul’s website is very user friendly. As expected, schedule the UHaul truck pickup zip code and drop-off zip code. It goes an additional step further and offers to arrange movers to professionally pack and load or unload and unpack the truck (but let’s you drive the truck). But this despite the user friend website, the reservation system turned out to be deceiving. I was under the impression that selecting the exact move date, Uhaul locations, and truck size implied a reservation. Instead, it was only a preference. I was informed one day before my move that the actual UHaul pickup location was over 20 miles away! What UHaul did was give me an extra 30 miles, which was in my opinion sub-par compensation for the inconvenience.
$50 Reservation Guarantee (1 out of 5 Stars)
This guarantee states “When you make a reservation, we guarantee to provide you with the equipment size, location, and pickup time as agreed. Should you not receive the equipment size, location, and pickup time you agreed to, U-Haul will compensate you $50”. But, if you read the fine print, these situations are nearly impossible to meet. Since UHaul assigns a truck to you the night before, at potentially a different site, the only way I can imagine this $50 be applicable is if the truck is completely unavailable and ruins your entire move, in which case $50 would not nearly be enough to compensate.
Uhaul Truck Pickup and Drop-off (3 out of 5 Stars)
The UHaul pick up terrible. The site I was assigned to at 1st Street in San Jose had the appearance it opened business the night before. With no official sign, only banners on buildings, it looked very unprofessional. Additionally, the truck I had reserved had not returned from the previous renter, and I ended up waiting an hour for the truck. The drop-off was easy to find and the process was easy.
Uhaul Truck Quality (5 out of 5 Stars)
When reading other UHaul reviews, several people mentioned the quality of the truck was terrible. Everything from bald tires and trucks that break down. What I found was scratches on the back of the truck, but the car runs very smoothly (though this comes from someone who doesn’t drive trucks very often).
At the end, I decided to go with UHaul mainly due to convenience. A strong reason why I decided to rent with UHaul this time and likely in the future is convenience of pickup and drop-off. At both the pickup and drop-off, UHaul was the closest rental stop. This is important because I don’t drive trucks often and I wanted to keep my need to drive the truck to a minimum. I give my overall opinion of UHaul a 3 out of 5 stars.