I just took the shuttle to the Rental Car Center at the airport and it got me thinking, what was the rental car situation at LAS like before the current facility?
Before the Rental Car Center (RCC) opened at the airport in 2007, when it was still called McCarran, the rental-car operation looked a lot different. The lack of a single consolidated hub rendered the experience somewhat a bit more complicated, slower, and less predictable.
Instead of a centralized RCC, the major rental-car agencies operated out of small service desks on the baggage-claim levels of the terminals. You went to the counters in the terminals and filled out the paperwork, then usually caught a shuttle to the off-airport lot to pick up the car. The smaller companies didn't have on-airport service desks, so you took their shuttle to the nearby location and went through the whole process there.
Returns were handled at the individual rental offices or at designated lots near the terminals. Some locations allowed direct returns to a curbside desk, while others required parking the vehicle and walking to the counter.
The RCC was designed to centralize all the rental-car operations, bringing all the companies into one facility to streamline the entire process. In our experience, it worked, at least to a certain degree. The process was certainly simplified, though since the very beginning, the wait times for the shuttle to the RCC have been ... long.
The RCC shuttles can experience significant backups, sometimes reaching 30 to 45 minutes due to staffing issues or high traffic. The airport recommends leaving three hours to catch your plane if you're returning a rental car. Some travelers tell us they don't rely on the shuttles at all and arrange for an Uber or Lyft to to make the short trip back to the airport when they're flying out.
We'd like to hear what you remember about your rental-car experiences before the RCC opened and how long your average wait times have been for the shuttle since then.
