I show up to pick up my car; as a Gold member it should be waiting for me, nicely warmed and with a small chocolate on the dashboard (not really). I am greeted by an admittedly nice woman who should have been home in bed with her cold and not spraying germs on the customers and staff. My car? Nowhere to be seen. We search. For 20 minutes the agent and I wander in and out of rows of cars until we find the car I reserved, totally trapped in the dead centre of a hundred other vehicles.
Back at the desk I ask to add another driver.
"That will be £9 per day"
"I'm a Gold member, it's free."
"Not in the UK it's not."
10 minutes of arguing back and forth gets me nowhere. The charge is added by the system and they can't wave it (like fuck they can't).
"Fine, forget it, just get me my car."
"It will take a bit of time..."
45 minutes later they manage to fish my car out and I go down to inspect it. It's ancient (by rental standards) and covered with scratches. I ask for another one. No dice. It's the last one of that type in stock. Fine, upgrade me. Certainly, that will be another £20 per day.
I just about lose it but they know I'm fucked. What am I going to do? I need this particular car (estate) to haul a bunch of furniture back from Devon and I know, as they do, that there is no where else I am going to get one three days before Christmas.
Defeated, I drive away. Three miles later I wonder why it's still freezing in the cab. After fiddling about with the dials and buttons I discover that the fan only works on full-blast. Great. I have a choice between blistering hot or freezing cold. This is shaping up to be a fun holiday.
I have just finished sending Hertz a sternly worded letter but I know it will disappear down a rabbit hole. All I can do now is tell as many people as humanly possible to avoid renting from Hertz in general and the Marble Arch branch in particular.
All Hertz needed to do was wave the second driver fee (like they say they do in their T&Cs) and they could have kept my good will and prevented me from slagging them on my blog, Twitter, Yelp and any other site I can find. I'll tell my friends and family about how fucked up they are and pass the word to our corporate travel people. At the end of the day, they didn't get my £45, won't get my normal six rentals a year from now on and maybe even lose a few more customers to boot.
As I told the drones behind the counter: you can't just treat people poorly and get away with it anymore, the Internet is a huge megaphone and if someone gets fucked over by a company, a pile of people are going to hear about it. Or at least the three people who read this blog.
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