Over the weekend I rented a car from Budget Rent-a-Car. I did so because it was relatively convenient, a competitive price, and prior experiences with them had been satisfactory. Mind you, this all happened in the following context: pressure to get to a flight on time, a boatload of stuff being carried, a cranky child in need of a nap, and a mind splitting headache.
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\nUpon return of the car yesterday, the young man checking me in said “you’ve only driven 71 miles.” I said, OK, whatever is on the odometer I wasn’t tracking since this was an unlimited miles rental. He then said “I’m going to have to add $10.50 to your rental fee.” At which point I give him a quizzical look and he goes on to explain “Unless you drive more than 75 miles our policy is to charge you $10.50.” Why I inquire? “Because it’s possible to return the car with a full gas tank without having fueled up.”
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\nTo which I answer, I just put fuel in the car, it was on 3\/4 and now it’s full. He responds “Where’s the receipt for the gas?” Now is the time that I make a decision, do I tell him about the hillbilly Circle K that had a broken receipt printer and I didn’t want to spend the 10 minutes waiting in line to perhaps get the receipt while my family is being harassed by the local wildlife (this really was a rough Circle K…) So I say “No, I don’t have it, the receipt printer was broken. Are you really going to charge me for not driving enough<\/b>?” He hands me the Budget policy stating you’ve got to drive 75 miles or present a receipt for fuel or they’ll charge you $10.50.
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\nThe young man is now given a choice, I say to him “Turn on the car, look at the fuel gauge. It’s sitting above the “F” line. When I put fuel in it, it was at the 3\/4 line. Do you think this car gets sufficient fuel efficiency to go 71 miles and still have the fuel indicator on “F”? Also, carefully consider this, I rent cars all the time and if you enforce policy without common sense, I will never rent from Budget again.” To which he responds “I’m just doing my job. You can take it up with customer service.”
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\nBudget, no doubt you spend boatloads of money like every other large company on customer loyalty and satisfaction. This is something right out of Dilbert tales of Induh-viduals – I am neither satisfied nor loyal. Here’s what your $10.50 cost you: On average, I rent cars 3 times a year for personal activity (not business, that’s a different number unfortunately…) and each of those rentals cost around $200 on average. I figure that I’ve got another at least 30 years of rentals in me, so doing the math the total addressable Mike rental revenue is: $18,000. Up to this point, Budget was getting every other one, so that’s $9,000 in future revenue traded for 4 miles on a stupid policy and $10.50 of revenue now. I hope you make it last, because it’s the last revenue you’ll ever see from me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Over the weekend I rented a car from Budget Rent-a-Car. I did so because it was relatively convenient, a competitive price, and prior experiences with them had been satisfactory. Mind you, this all happened in the following context: pressure to get to a flight on time, a boatload of stuff being carried, a cranky child […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}