Warning on Goldcar at Barcelona Airport

Beware, this is a Goldcar warning for Barcelona airport, a warning for those who have a prepaid car rental from rentalcars.com with Goldcar from Barcelona airport.

There is no such thing as a Goldcar office in the Terminal 1 building of Barcelona airport.

The office is several kilometres away and only accessible using a shuttle bus provided by Goldcar.

I recently made a reservation with rentalcars.com for a car hire from Barcelona airport. 
This is how it all went about.

In the course of the booking process there is absolutely no indication at all under way to tell you what company your car will be reserved from. 

These are the rental bureaus available

No sign of the name of the provider here

Nope, no sign of Goldcar here either.

Even as you are prompted to pay, there is no telling who is going to be your provider

Once you have completed the payment process your reservation details will come up and give you that name.

Does this look like a good description of the way to the office?
I thought the "shuttle bus provided" meant from T2 to T1 of the airport.

As that name happened to be Goldcar, here's our story.

Our family of five came to the area of car rental bureaus of the airport, carrying 8 pieces of luggage, including suitcases weighing 15 kgs each. We saw no signs at all saying Goldcar, so I tried making phone calls to the number they had given, which ominously went unanswered by several attempts. So then it was queueing the information desk for directions, which was to walk a loong way over a connecting building to the other side of a local airport road.

Just walk down this corridor following the white G sign...

Having taken the elevator down when we got to the other end, still seeing no signs saying Goldcar, I met a nice british man who had a Goldcar rental car parked alongside the road, and asked him for directions. He happened to be lost himself for the place to where he was to deliver his car, but did tell us to stand in line for however long it would take for a minibus with goldcars emblem on to show up. Then he himself would follow the minibus to be able to deliver his car.

The holding area for the minibus

  
A 20 minutes or so later the minibus did arrive at the holding area, the driver loading up an undetermined number of suitcases on top of eachother in the back of the van. There was only enough room for us all in the bus when two people sat in front with the driver. We then went on driving several kilometers, leaving the airport area through several side roads and roundabouts.  The radio cracking with messages between the drivers, the van headed on through the guarded entrance of an industrial site and drove on to an abrupt halt in front of some tired building with large "Goldcar" markings on the side. It looked like we had arrived at some mexican jail. Now we would be next to enroll for incarceration? There were certainly nothing about the surroundings that would indicate otherwise.

There was a queue inside the offices going out of the doors with about 15 people before me in line. When nothing had happened for the next 25 minutes and the queue hadn't moved as much as an inch forward, I decided with my family to go back to the airport using the same shuttlebus from Goldcar we had arrived with. It had in the meantime had the time to fetch another load of unsuspecting clients who now formed the back end of the queue. 
Coming back to the airport we took a taxi instead to our destination, which wasn't very far away, in Castelldefels.
I managed to eventually get my car out in the evening that day by taking a local bus to their industrial site near Viladecans, if anyone knows where that is. What a tiresome mess it was.
Wouldn't it be tiresome if you were going to a store to get bread and milk and were met by a sign directing you to parking lot number G9 to park and take a shuttlebus to escalator B4 which goes to floor D3 where you can take elevator F6 to go to the store to get your milk and bread? Whoever had devised an arrangement like that wouldn't have been of his right mind. The same thing could be said about this kind of arrangement for an airport. Airlines will tell you to be at the airport at least two hours before departure. How early must you be there to first deliver your car to Goldcar in Barcelona?

The car rentals present at terminal 1 Barcelona

The car rental offices that are there, at Terminal 1, and have their cars in the parking house adjacent to the airport, is Avis, Hertz, Sixt, Europcar, National and Atesa. They have taken the cost of an office location close to their customers. I think today doing this again I'd rather get a quote from them, directly on their websites. It was surprising to see how little difference it was for instance to the offer from Sixt. A fraction more expensive.
I would definitely consider it today. At least remembering the 48 hour free cancellation policy that you have when you have a fully prepaid rent with rentalcars.com.  
The hassle of international travel is enough as it is today in my opinion as to drag your whole family on their vacation with you into something like this.

I have to say this also. After delivering back our car when the rent was over, the driver of the van actually took us directly to the departure hall from that industrial site, to come within 40 meters of our check-in counter with all our luggage. I'll give them that, that wouldn't have happened with any of the other bureaus.
I have used rentalcars.com several times, in Spain successfully with Goldcar as vendor in Mallorca and this year also in Gran Canaria with success and with nothing to complain about. This is only about the Barcelona airport arrangement. Not about Goldcar in general.