“Welcome to Town, USA! Please stay seated till the aircraft has parked at the gate, the temperature outside is 69 Freedom Degrees, the local time is 6:19 PM so good luck leaving the airport with any amount of haste and no there isn’t an air-rail link, we thank you for flying with us, enjoy spending almost as much time in traffic as you did on the plane!”
Don’t forget that if you rented a car, they don’t actually know how to do fucking reservations and there’s a really good chance you’ll show up and the car you’ve reserved “isn’t available.”
Happened to my partners sister when she visited her mom. They didn’t have the car she rented and only had EVs left. She’s not against EVs, but she’s in a city she’s unfamiliar with, and an EV charging station isn’t as easy to find as a gas station. She ended up having her mom drive out to pick her up because it was such a mess.
Like, Seinfeld made a joke about how car rental companies don’t understand what a “reservation” actually is nearly thirty fucking years ago and jack fucking shit has changed. It can be talked about all throughout American society and derided as terrible, but because there’s no legal repercussions, nothing will ever fucking change.
Betting that car rental companies also overbook the hell out of their fleets which is why this happens.
Abso. Lutely.
I have to assume the data car rental companies have shows that spending money on customer satisfaction does not make up for the cost of not renting out a reserved car when somebody is standing there with money in hand.
They’re in a market where people usually shop online ahead of time on price, or automatically go to them based on loyalty programs or corporate policies for work travel. So by the time they interact with you, you’re essentially locked in to the transaction and one of their low level employees gets to try to placate you for the negative results of company policies.
I mean you’re just describing capitalism at this point.
Well yeah, though keeping your customers happy actually matters in many other industries, whether that is a quality product, or customer experience, or both.
Just goes to show that in industries where customers are used to everybody sucking ass, spending money to not suck ass hurts you. It’s like natural selection where such a weakness likely means you won’t stick around. Or, more likely, you’ll adapt.
It sucks, but that’s why I think it happens. Every transaction is a vote with somebody’s wallet, and many people just want their shit cheap and don’t care how it got that way.
Not only that but holy shit if a lot of customer service interactions aren’t just like that now. They use doublespeak to get around customers and look for ways to give people indirect answers so no one ever gets any real help.
The trick with EVs while traveling is using a charger that’s >50kwh and having a working level 2 charger where you’re staying for the night. If you’re doing anything else it’s a miserable experience. Electrify America was a great charging experience on my roadtrip from Texas to California and back over the summer, everything else was so slow or just didn’t work, luckily they have them spaced out along all the major interstates where you just stop at the EA stops and charge to 80% or so and keep going. Plugshare is a good site to check if you’re off the major interstates.
Not just car rentals, it feels like the whole travel industry has no idea what a fucking reservation is. Every other time I fly they’re asking for people to give up seats because they “overbooked”.
Just a tiny amount of common sense legislation would make reservations actually fucking work, but it’ll never happen because all the travel companies have to do is spend like $50k to
bribelobby half of congress and then make millions continuing on with their shitty practices