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Colin
For my sins I spent most of the 80s as area manager for Budget Rent A Car at the London Airports franchise, which included a few other locations in central London, Slough and - rather curiously - Plymouth. I do happen to know a little bit about car rental, therefore, and can tell you that if any of the staff for whom I had been responsible had treated you like that, they would have been dismissed on the spot. In a cut throat industry like car rental, customer care is everything, and Avis (in my time, at least) were top dog in that department. In my experience, when calamity happens, the only course of action is to be 100% honest with the customer; had it been myself or any of my staff on duty, the fact that the car was in Maidstone would have been explained to you, the paperwork completed and you would have been driven home whilst your car was being driven down from Maidstone to Dover, and the car delivered to you later. Your first day's rental would have been free of charge and a 10% discount on your next rental offered; the fact is that things do go wrong in all forms of business, but the car rental business especially so due to things out of the company's control happening, such as accidents, traffic jams and breakdowns. All Budget customers were treated like adults and not fobbed off; the vast majority responded well to that, in the understanding that shit does happen - a few didn't like it and vented their spleen, but generally calmed down after a while and accepted things. I think the staff on duty that day at Avis were inexperienced and made the classic mistake of trying to cover things up - the result: a customer who will never use Avis again and who will tell everybody their story, as you've done. How much better would it have been to have made a fuss of the customer and told things as they were - you'd have probably accepted the fates and appreciated the company going out of their way to put things right.
As an illustration of this, I'll tell you a little anecdote of one rental at Gatwick that I covered out of hours........ We'd taken delivery of half a dozen new Peugeot 205 GTIs one particular afternoon, and they were sitting on the forecourt gleaming, full of petrol and ready to go when the office closed at 6pm. I came back at 9pm to cover a late booking, and whilst I was waiting for his flight to clear and the phone to ring, a customer walked in off the street wanting to rent one of the new Peugeots. Did the paperwork, and off he went. Twenty minutes later, the phone rang just as I was locking up, and it was the same customer complaining that the car smelled of petrol; he wasn't too far away, so I took one of the others as a replacement and swapped the car over for him at the hotel he was staying at. He was absolutley made up that we'd gone the extra mile and shown customer care that we hadn't really needed to. The upshot was that his company opened a volume user account with Budget Rent A Car the very next day that in its first year generated over £100,000 worth of business with our franchise alone. And the cause of the petrol fumes in his original car? A rupture in the pipe leading to the petrol tank from the filler nozzle - the boot compartment was half full of petrol! And, he'd smoked a cigarette in the car on the way to his hotel! And, so had I on my way home in it!
