My son just turned 30 and he decided to take a vacation in Colorado with his girlfriend.
Here in Kansas City, his car began emitting white smoke. His girl friend’s SUV had a driver side window that just broke. Dang the luck!
But never fear- this is America and we have car rental companies, not to mention parents with credit cards, and with a pre-existing good experience of rentals.
Mom and Dad stepped in to be helpful- “Hey- we’ll rent a car for you!”
My son’s first reaction was noble. “No dad, we don’t need a handout…”
Undiminished in our parental spirit, my wife found a car on Budget and booked a small SUV for them to pick up today at 8:30am.
Google and the internet are truly wonderful.
And that’s where it began to go wrong.
They turned up, as specified on the dot. But the person administering the local Budget office didn’t arrive until 9am. (it says they’re open from 7:30am on the phone message)
Next, they didn’t have the SUV. Alternatives were offered. Feeling time pressure to get on the road, they accepted a Sedan as opposed to the MiniVan on the lot- based on their assessment of MPG.
As my son and his girl friend drove, they realized that they really would need an SUV. It turns out that the sedan is even low for a regular car. Perhaps it would be sensible to go to another Budget and make the switch to their original choice. Calling home for advice and help, mom and dad dutifully took up the cause to call the Budget help lines to facilitate the switch, while the blissful couple drove through patchy cell phone coverage into eastern Colorado.
Mom discovered that they needed various contract and reference numbers from the paperwork in the car. That was the first call to customer service. On the second call, the person recognized the numbers but they said the car was in someone else’s name. This made no sense to us.
We actually made three further calls and got cut off (or were we deliberately dropped?)
Dad drove to the local office to ask the admin there. She was locking the door at 6pm and said to call the manager the next day. The administrator also said that national customer service would not be able to help, which made no sense to dad. And the lady said that they had been offered three cars and the couple “had put up no resistance”. If they had wanted to wait, they could have got an SUV for them. (The young couple and mom say that they were never offered the options to wait and were only offered two cars. Plus, how would they know that they could have “resisted” and that this would have led to the provision of the correct vehicle?)
But once they were driving, they realized that the sedan was extra low in terms of ground clearance. It would absolutely not be practical and likely unsafe in the mountains.
Budget is an internationally recognized brand. So it came as a huge surprise that when we called customer service there were four occasions when our line to the help desk dropped (I know I already mentioned this- yes we are angry). It was an even greater surprise when the son took a photo of the agreement in the car and we discovered that it was not for him but someone else with a different date. No wonder none of the customer service people quite understood what we were asking for.
Anyway, mom and dad, as persevering detectives on a mission, now had the information to call Budget again to let them know that the car their son was driving didn’t have an agreement, wasn’t in his name and of course to ask for corrective action. You’d think customer service might be able to get on that. After all, they’d surely have his credit card and driver license information, wouldn’t they? Think again. No, the local budget office is a franchisee and for some unknown reason, national customer service can’t help.
Not sure how this ends yet. The young vacationers are camping tonight in Colorado to the east of Denver. Mom will go into the local office tomorrow for 8:30am opening time in an attempt to figure it all out. This is America, land of the consumer. We can Make America Great again.
I’ll update the story tomorrow.
NulPoint 