Always put your flight info on a rental car booking.

A friend just talked me into a habit I'd skipped for years: putting your flight number on your rental car booking.

His flight out of ORD got hit by thunderstorms and pushed back about three hours, so he wasn't landing until around 2am. The rental counter closed at 12:30. Normally that's a dead end: Uber to the hotel, sleep, then Uber back in the morning to actually get the car.

Except he'd added his flight info to the reservation. National has a policy that if your flight is on the booking, they'll wait up to two hours past closing for a delayed arrival. They even called him the moment his plane hit the gate to check he was still coming, and he drove off with the car like nothing happened.

I never bothered with the flight number before. It felt like one more optional field. Turns out it's the difference between driving off and getting stranded overnight. I'm adding it to every rental from now on.