National will hold reservation without a problem for "late" arrival. In January, my DW and I were delayed at O'Hare for 6 or 7 hours (as time goes on, the length of the delay gets longer and longer, I'm afraid). Once we knew we would be late, I called National to check on the situation, concerned about losing the car. They indicated that MCO is a 24-hour operation, so there should not be a problem even if we arrived well into the night. This turned out to be true, although we did end up with a short-term billing snafu. Our reservation was based on a weekly rate which requires a 5-day minimum. With our original arrival time, we were about 2 hours into the 5-day period, so we "qualifed" for the weekly rate rather than the higher daily rate. With the late pick-up, we ended up with a 4-day rental instead. This actually inflated the rate by about $50. When dropping off the car, I had to go to the counter (I hate that
) and get the service agent to adjust the bill. She was very cooperative, finally adjusting the daily rate to force the computer to make the total for the rental come out the same as our printed confirmation, even though we did not satisfy the contract condition by meeting the minimum rental period requirement.
Since you are dealing with a much longer period of time, you should not run into a problem like this one. You will still qualify for the same weekly rate with whatever other discounts are included. I would simply show up when you arrive. Flights are delayed all the time due to weather, equipment problems, etc., so you would hardly be the first one.
Ralph
