butta1898

Rented from off-airport location. I drive 9 miles home to pack luggage, and when I get ready to leave, the rental doesn't start. Location is closed so called Avis 800 number. They send Pop-A-Lock to jump it, and send me on my way. I get to my destination about 2 hours away and park it. Early the next morning, it won't start again. I call 800 again, they send a tow truck. The tow truck takes me and the disabled vehicle to the airport to swap out cars. They put me in another vehicle and send me on. This process takes about 5 hours start to finish. When I return the second vehicle to the original location back home, they take off a day's worth of charges for my trouble.

My questions that stem from this are:
Why didn't Avis just send me a new vehicle on my first call? Should I contact corporate asking for full compensation? I realize it was not the location's fault, as they get their inventory from the airport, and both times I broke down they were closed. Is the compensation from the rental location enough?

IAHtraveler

They didn't know if it was the vehicle or your fault so why should they go to the expense unless you were pushy that they do it.

Doesn't hurt to ask if you feel it is reasonable. Often, reasonable people often differ on what is reasonable, so it's your call. I would. They should have just sent you the new car on the truck instead of making you go back to the office. They've done that for me about 6x when cars had mechanical issues. They send the new contract w the driver but now that it's in the app, it's not even really necessary.

​​​​​​​Keep us posted.

jackal

Agree; that's what they should have done.

Although depending on the situation, that doesn't always work out. When I managed an office in Alaska, customers would sometimes break down several hundred miles away from the nearest rental car office of any type. If they broke down in Homer, sometimes it was logistically easier to dispatch a tow truck out of Homer to pick the car up and bring it to Anchorage than to send one from Anchorage.

If the customer was on their way to Anchorage at that time anyway, they'd often just ride in the cab of the truck to minimize their delay, but if they were staying in Homer, then they might have to wait 10 hours until the truck made its way to Anchorage, dropped off the broken car, picked up a replacement car, and drove back down to Homer. Saves the customer 10 hours of time, but they also lost use of the car for 10 hours (which may or may not have inconvenienced them, depending on their plans for the day), and there really was no way around it. (Even towing a car from Anchorage first would be a 5-hour delay at a minimum in that case, due to the drive time.)

This generally isn't an issue when driving in a densely populated area with several locations that cars can be picked up at and tow trucks can be dispatched from, but rural areas in the Lower 48 can be similar (I had an issue once on US-395 east of the Sierras, and the closest options to help were literally LAX or Reno, and I've worked with people who have had issues in rural northern Arizona and southern Utah and other similarly distant places where the nearest help was hours away).

In general, though, yes, the preferred method is to bring a replacement car to the customer, drop it off with them, and take the disabled car back. That's generally the quickest way to get the customer on his or her way.

As for compensation, I would decide on a dollar amount that you feel a reasonable person's time is worth and factor that into how much it actually affected your plans for the day (i.e. 5 hours in the late evening when you would have otherwise been sitting on the couch is probably worth less than missing meetings), and then ask for that dollar amount. If you were paying $100/day and they comped a day, you might have already gotten reasonable compensation. If you were paying $15 a day, then maybe not, and you might ask for your whole rental to be comped.

butta1898

Thanks all for the replies.

Seems what I would think is the easiest method, as stated, was really Avis' second option. They kept trying to jump-start a car that was brought to the off-airport rental location with a semi-dead battery. But I digress.

I decided that being comped a full day was reasonable enough, as it cut my rate virtually in half. I still reported the issue and made sure to make note of who went above and beyond to assist me in the process (the tow truck driver and the local rental clerk).