I struggled over whether or not to include this, as Steel Curtain Rising’s has a hard and fast rule of focusing exclusively on Steelers football. But I found myself a loophole in the fact that Steelers Nation is by definition made up of a group of travelers.

So here goes our warning:

To all of you road warriors of Steelers Nation, be very wary of renting from Alamo National Car Rental.

As regular readers of this site know, yours truly is located in Buenos Aires, Argentina. My folks were in town for Christmas, and we needed transport to get us to where we’d be celebrating on the 24th and 25th.

No problem. We reserved a car with Alamo one month in advance.

Everything was in order.

We had our reservation for 4:30 on the 23rd. Now, did they tell you when you reserved that you had a 1 hour time limit to pick up your car? Did they mention that once that hour was up you lost your reservation?

Well, if they told you they didn’t tell us.

In fact, they didn’t even mention that we were ½ hour into this mystical one hour grace period when my wife called at 5:00 pm to mention that we were running late. In fact, they told us not to worry.

So when we got there, our car was gone. Not only did we lose the reservation, but the person there made it quite clear that he was not going to lift a finger to help us. There was another couple there that also was having problems getting their car, even though they’d prepaid and were on time.

It was clear that Alamo had overbooked, and had no compunction about screwing their customers.

So fellow members of Steelers Nation, if you’re traveling and need to rent a car, be careful with Alamo; or better yet, just rent a car from one of Alamo’s competitors.