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Monday, August 2, 2010

A Letter to Avis

Dear Avis:

I want to take a moment to thank you for being so helpful when my father and I were running around last Friday trying to find a place to rent a car.  Since you don’t know me personally, you may not be able to pick up the sarcasm in my voice, so let me explain something.  I do not REALLY want to thank you.  Yes, we did manage to rent a car from you for our trip home from Myrtle Beach, but it was not the greatest experience dealing with you.

You see, my family and I were in an accident that rendered our van unable to be driven on Thursday night.  Thankfully, we were all ok, but we were stranded tourists.  Your agency was the third….I repeat, THIRD agency we went to looking for a car to get us from South Carolina to Kentucky.

I’ll take this time to give a few shout outs:  Thank You Enterprise Rent A Car for not wanting to rent us a car because they couldn’t directly bill our insurance company.  Apparently they didn’t feel our credit card was good enough.  Also, thanks go out to an agency, whom I believe was called National Rent a car or something like that.  Honestly, they were so little help, I didn’t bother to learn their name…they were in the Myrtle Beach Airport.  They didn’t even have a car available for a one way rental.  Sooooo helpful.  Yep.

I will say Avis, at least you had a car available to get us to Kentucky.  When we explained that we would like to rent a vehicle with enough trunk space to get four people and their week’s worth of luggage home, the agent seemed willing to oblige.  Somewhere along the way, something went horribly wrong.  We were told you had no vans or SUVs, but the car we were being given would have plenty of room.  Sure, ummm……apparently we have a very different definition of “plenty” of room.

Yep, there was a trunk.  It hardly fit anything in it, but it was there.  After all our luggage was in the car, we could only fit three people in the car.  That’s a problem since we came down with four.  Lucky for us (and with no help from you darling Avis) we were not alone on this trip.  My sister and brother-in-law had another car down there, so they were able to take our fourth passenger home.  Unfortunately, she had to stay at their house Saturday night because we couldn’t even fit her in the car for the short drive between their house and ours.

I think the problem may have been that your agent wasn’t paying enough attention to her customers.  All she was interested in was trying to sell us all the little “extras” that you can get with a car rental.  We told her repeatedly that our insurance agency would insure the rental while we had it, and she repeatedly tried to get us to purchase insurance from your agency…..if she had been paying attention, she would have realized we didn’t NEED or WANT your insurance.  We also didn’t NEED or WANT the GPS she kept trying to shove down our throats.  We told her we had our own, but apparently she felt yours was better.  Whatever, we made it down to Myrtle Beach with ours, thanks so much, we’ll make it home with it. 

Oh, and we really appreciated the “change oil” light coming on on the way home.  Seriously, don’t you check these things before you rent a car.  Oh, but let us forget to fill up the tank before we bring it back, and heads will roll. 

Since we were all bruised and banged up from the accident that led us to needing a rental car, we decided to rent the car until Monday just in case we weren’t able to get the car back on Sunday.  We’d have hated to have said we’d return the car on Sunday, then not be able to get it back to you.  We didn’t want those extra charges.  Turns out we could have given it back Sunday, but didn’t end up doing that because you would have charged us a higher rate for returning it early.  Seriously, I mean really, seriously.  Geeze.

Well, you have your tiny, boxy, loud, little car back in your greedy little hands.  The one bright spot was the agent who helped us when we returned the car to you at your Florence, Kentucky location.  He did seem to not have his head in his ass.  That was good.  The rest of it however, was not a great experience.  I’d actually rather not have to deal with you again.  So, I’m breaking up with you.  It’s you, not me, and I won’t be setting you up with any of my friends either.

Sincerely,

Me

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