If you place the reservation ahead-of-time, it doesn't take that long at the desk (besides the line, if there is one). Sure, it could be faster, but I've rented plenty of cars from a lot of different companies (with City Rent-A-Car being my preference in SF, and Enterprise everywhere else) and it's pretty tolerable.

Hell, my first ever car rental (to go from DC to Harrisburg because that leg of my flight got cancelled) was a walk-in with Hertz, and the slowest part was picking out a car.

Re: getting to the car in the first place, just about every airport I've been to has a bunch of rental agencies onsite (either walkable or via a shuttle bus), and I suspect HSR stations would be no different.

If you have status with the rental car companies, a lot of them have express pickup where you just walk up to a designated spot number that's listed in the app and drive away. I have no idea why they go thru the whole charade of retyping everything on the computer at the rental car location if you don't have status, when they obviously know how to save data for other people.

> I have no idea why they go thru the whole charade of retyping everything on the computer at the rental car location if you don't have status

It's a security feature. It's more secure for them to retype everything then to try and verify that everything you typed matches the ID you put in front of them.

When you have status they've already done all that once and they trust you because you've successfully rented from them before. Without status, they have no reason to trust you, so they have to verify everything.

It's a risk/reward trade off for them.