Fox Rent-a-Car, no longer my friends
Had an extremely bad experience with Fox Rent-a-Car tonight at San Jose airport tonight, which is unfortunate, because they're generally one of the cheapest options.
I've had bad rental experiences in the past and let them slide: for example, arriving in Florida at 5am to a car rental company who pulled out around four cars and went to pull out around three more before discovering every one of them was not currently fit for rental or scheduled for service, then finally going back to one of their earlier choices. In general, I like to think I'm patient and forviging of incompetence or inflexibility in customer service staff.
However, tonight, the service was so abysmally bad that I canceled my reservation and went straight to another car rental counter (happily paying walk-in rates for a higher class of car, as Fox weren't getting a cent of my money).
So just what did they do?
Well, I've rented from Fox a few times in the past. I'm a Fox rewards member. Each time I've had
nicolerego as an additional driver, when she was under 25, there was a surcharge, more recently, there wasn't. I've also rented in her name only on my credit card once; there weren't any issues.
So today, we got to the counter, and I presented our IDs and my credit card. The young girl behind the counter went through the process, authorized $150 on my credit card (by policy, they authorize the lesser of the estimated rental and $250, and the estimated rental was something around $95 which somehow rounds to $150), and then ask for my Nicole's major credit card to do the same (she doesn't have one, and she'd just withdrawn from her debit card so she couldn't even offer that).
After some discussion and asking to talk to the manager, I spoke to the 'lead' who repeated the same thing. Nicole asked what exactly the 'lead' was, and she said she looked after the place after hours so she was 'it' as far as we were concerned. I offered that they could pre-auth $300 or even $1000 on my card: not interested. I pointed out that she had rented from them several times in the past which would be recorded under their rewards system. No good.
Then I asked if there was any way I could talk to a manager. Now this was interesting: apparently the manager was a quick two-way radio call away (despite the 'lead' being in charge). So, over the two-way, they said to the manager 'the customer doesn't understand ...' and the manager said to them something mostly unintelligible, but I caught the part about only making exceptions for 'major accounts' like 'Google'. At this point I mentioned that I was a Google staff member. Their response: well, that doesn't help _her_. I informed them that I would be communicating to other Google staff about the bad service; their response: "is that a threat?" (like there was something wrong with telling other staff how bad their service was?)
Their next comment: Budget is right over there and they don't require cards from the secondary driver, in fact most of those companies don't.
That was it, we were straight over to Alamo rent-a-car (the nearest counter without a queue). Fantastic service. Rather than picking out the car based on a description or picture, just go and pick out any car in the relevant portions of the lot. Very friendly. And of course, no need to pre-auth the full cost once per driver.
The bottom line: I'm posting this from a Alamo rental car on interstate 5 on the way down to San Diego for the weekend.
I've had bad rental experiences in the past and let them slide: for example, arriving in Florida at 5am to a car rental company who pulled out around four cars and went to pull out around three more before discovering every one of them was not currently fit for rental or scheduled for service, then finally going back to one of their earlier choices. In general, I like to think I'm patient and forviging of incompetence or inflexibility in customer service staff.
However, tonight, the service was so abysmally bad that I canceled my reservation and went straight to another car rental counter (happily paying walk-in rates for a higher class of car, as Fox weren't getting a cent of my money).
So just what did they do?
Well, I've rented from Fox a few times in the past. I'm a Fox rewards member. Each time I've had
nicolerego as an additional driver, when she was under 25, there was a surcharge, more recently, there wasn't. I've also rented in her name only on my credit card once; there weren't any issues.
So today, we got to the counter, and I presented our IDs and my credit card. The young girl behind the counter went through the process, authorized $150 on my credit card (by policy, they authorize the lesser of the estimated rental and $250, and the estimated rental was something around $95 which somehow rounds to $150), and then ask for my Nicole's major credit card to do the same (she doesn't have one, and she'd just withdrawn from her debit card so she couldn't even offer that).
After some discussion and asking to talk to the manager, I spoke to the 'lead' who repeated the same thing. Nicole asked what exactly the 'lead' was, and she said she looked after the place after hours so she was 'it' as far as we were concerned. I offered that they could pre-auth $300 or even $1000 on my card: not interested. I pointed out that she had rented from them several times in the past which would be recorded under their rewards system. No good.
Then I asked if there was any way I could talk to a manager. Now this was interesting: apparently the manager was a quick two-way radio call away (despite the 'lead' being in charge). So, over the two-way, they said to the manager 'the customer doesn't understand ...' and the manager said to them something mostly unintelligible, but I caught the part about only making exceptions for 'major accounts' like 'Google'. At this point I mentioned that I was a Google staff member. Their response: well, that doesn't help _her_. I informed them that I would be communicating to other Google staff about the bad service; their response: "is that a threat?" (like there was something wrong with telling other staff how bad their service was?)
Their next comment: Budget is right over there and they don't require cards from the secondary driver, in fact most of those companies don't.
That was it, we were straight over to Alamo rent-a-car (the nearest counter without a queue). Fantastic service. Rather than picking out the car based on a description or picture, just go and pick out any car in the relevant portions of the lot. Very friendly. And of course, no need to pre-auth the full cost once per driver.
The bottom line: I'm posting this from a Alamo rental car on interstate 5 on the way down to San Diego for the weekend.