I keep finding news of this station/airport surcharge so strange. I always rent through AutoEurope and always get the car from an airport or train station location and have never paid such a surcharge. Maybe it's because I use the French AutoEurope website.

Many years ago, I worked for Avis, and very often we did not have the cars specifically requested, notably automatic transmission. When the customer absolutely could not accept another car, we would call every other agency in the city if necessary but sometimes it took half a day to dig up a car... and this was Paris.