May 9, 2008
What’s More Overrated Than Zipcar? Not Much.
Image by M.V. Jantzen via Flickr
I’m a sucker for a service with a great online experience. If it’s a service that ultimately saves me money, even better.
Enter Zipcar, a car rental service available in a few metropolitan areas of the country.
The premise is simple: pay a low annual fee, and you can reserve cars of varying sizes for anywhere between an hour and a whole day. Gas, insurance, and parking are included; all you pay is the hourly rental fee, which varies by the make of the car.
You get a card that you carry with you. At your appointed time, you go to the car, touch the card to the sensor on the windshield, and the doors unlock. They keys and a gas card are inside. Off you go. At the end of your time, return the car where you found it.
Awesome.
Except when it doesn’t work. In my case, the system failed two out of two times.
The first time we were to pick up the lady’s son at the airport when he was visiting New York over spring break. I get up at 6:00 a.m. and walk a mile to the lot and guess what: NO CAR.
I call the number, and they “don’t know where it is.” Awesome.
So they get me another reservation, a couple of miles away. I hop in a cab (for which I still have not been reimbursed as promised) to fetch the replacement car and get on my way.
Okay, so that was a hassle, but it ended up working out sort of okay. But now I’m wary.
Fast forward to the present. We’re supposed to pick up a friend at Newark Airport tomorrow morning so she can visit us for the weekend.
My phone rings at 5:00 p.m. on Friday. Guess what? The car you reserved has to go in for service, but they have a two-seater available for less time, or a bigger vehicle in Williamsburg. Great. Except there are no trains between us and Williamsburg this weekend.
I calmly explained the situation to the representative, and told her not only did I want to cancel my reservation but I wanted to go ahead and cancel my account altogether.
A short while later I received a confirmation email. I visited the website to check my account, and realized that I’ve now paid $120.01 for cars that I never got. A call to their billing department later, and I’m told they “may refund the annual fee, but that’s up to them.”
I was nice to the billing lady, but no, actually, it’s not up to them. It’s up to me.
Zipcar is zero for two on actually delivering the car I reserved. One time was a huge hassle and caused us to be late, so the lady’s son stood around La Guardia for a while waiting for us. The second time would’ve been more of the same.
Fool me once, shame on you. And just like The Who, I won’t get fooled again.
I’m awaiting a follow-up phone call sometime over the weekend. I’ve been exceedingly nice through all this, but that ends unless I hear what I want to hear.
Give me my money back, Zipcar. I’m sure I’ve just had bad luck and this isn’t typical of your service. Or maybe it is. Time for a trip to consumerist.com to find out, and maybe submit my happy story so others will think carefully about signing up.
Next time, we’re going to Avis. It’s no more expensive when you factor in the annual fee, and for all the more we use a car (which is maybe four times a year) I’d prefer to deal with a company that actually delivers what they promise.
Maybe Zipcar should take some of the resources they put into their awesome website and actually provide the service as advertised.
that sucks. It does remind me, however, that I owe eWireless a similar rant.
[...] In my previous post I outlined my recent troubles with the Zipcar service. [...]