All in All a Really Good Rental Experience
Pros: Rental office very convenient to train station in Caen. Clearly marked with signage. Rental agent very nice and seemed to know his job. We speak French but still his excellent English was helpful and for non French speakers, would be a huge plus. Car was very nice and exactly as described. Paperwork was clear except for key return and location of return lot. The rental was expensive but comparable to other companies in Caen so cannot really complain, they all seem expensive compared to other rentals in other places. We drove the car for 2.5 days, and it was a big car by French standards, for less than 15 euros worth of diesel fuel. We have rented in Caen many times. Avis is far and away the best. It is an American company with American service standards, which helps a lot.
Cons: The car was 20 minutes late getting there and we were waiting. Also, we really wanted to take an earlier train from Paris but the rental office closes for several hours in the middle of the day. This has been the case for years. People are coming on a train from Paris that arrives around noon and you find the rental office dark and locked. There is nothing that warns you when you rent the car. We were victims of this before so knew to watch for it with Avis but it is really annoying. For the return, the instructions to return the key were to go to lost and found on platform 1. There is no platform 1. After a 10 minute search, during which the Caen train station information desk was unmanned, we asked an attendant at the hot dog stand where lost and found is and were directed to platform A. The lot to return the car is a substantial walk to the train station, which is not told either on the contract or verbally. So we walked all that distance with a lot of luggage when we could have dropped all that off ahead of the return and sent one person to this lot, not 4. The location of the return lot is VERY obscure. We had a GPS and even so found the entrance to the lot to be extremely hard to find. A map and some verbal directions instead of just an address would have been helpful. We found it but almost didn't, even though we have been there before and I recall a LOT of driving around the first time.
