We recently took a trip to St. Louis and reserved a car through Car Rentals.com. Once we arrived the deal supposedly arranged through their website was not as promised. They had promised us the weekly rate which Dollar said was not appropriate for the amount of time we were renting. We would have to pay the daily rate for the time frame which was, according to the Dollar representative 11.68 more per day. We have a separate issue with Dollar which we have notified them about, however when we tried to resolve this with CarRentals.com and tried to get an explanation for what happened we received emails that were antagonistic in nature.
The first email we sent was
Hello
I wanted to let you know my extreme dissatisfaction with your service on our recent vacation. We reserved a rental car with your service with a reservation # of Q7275430. When we arrived at our destination in St. Louis we were told by a Dollar representative that the shuttle ran every 5 minutes. Once we were picked up 45 minutes later and taken to the Dollar
lot we were then informed that they were unable to honor the agreement we had arranged through your site as we did not qualify for the weekly rate.
The change in rate was going to cost us and additional $55 for the rental. This was after we were in sweltering heat and humidity at 10pm, it was over 95 degrees and the shuttle was on the top level of the parking lot. My 83 year old Grandmother sat in this heat for 45 minutes, fortunately for you nothing happened to her or I would have retained legal
representation due to the complete ineptitude that was a result of using your website. I have similar issues with Dollar Rental Car, but it seems to me that if you are making reservations with an agency you should know whether or not they will honor this request. I will be letting my friends and family know to stay away from your website and as an employee of Los Angeles County I will be sure to pass this information on to people in the CEOs office so that something like this never happens again to myself, friends, family and my employer. I realize that things have become heightened due to the lateness of the hour that day and the sweltering heat, but to have to leave the facility and procure an rental car on my own through Hertz, at a lower price than I was able to find through your website does not seem like an efficient business model. What I learned from this experience is that it is better to get your own reservation and stay away from inept websites that make promises they are unable to deliver, and that is what I will let everyone I know about your website,
Michael Ross
Their response was
CarRentals.com would like to thank you for emailing us with your comments. We continue to strive to meet or exceed our customers travel expectations and if one of our affiliates does not fulfill their obligation to you, then we appreciate being made aware of their shortcomings.
With all due respect: the reservation you made on our site was a confirmed DOLLAR reservation which you could have viewed on Dollar.com.
Any "inept" behaviors that you witnessed had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that you made your reservation on our
site.
We are glad you and your Grandmother were able to obtain a vehicle with Hertz.
My response to this was
With all due respect, that was not what happened. Did you even bother to find out what our experience was at Dollar before you sent this email. I never said we didnt have a reservation, I clearly said the reservation was not honored as reserved, and additional charges were added on if we accepted the deal. It appears obvious that you dont want to resolve this matter so I will be making sure to post on as many websites as I can this ridiculous experience. A simple apology would have gone a long way and your willingness to look into how this matter played out in order to avoid others from going through the same experience would have been helpful. Id like a contact number where I can speak with your supervisor so I may speak with
someone who is willing to take responsibility
Their response -
Since you did not pick up the vehicle, we are unable to determine what additional charges you are referring to.
To help you better estimate the cost of your rental, the vendor has provided the following information in their Local Policy which can be found under the Total Price on the Order Page:
This email went on to quote the practices of St. Louis airport, which had nothing to do with our situation. While on this vacation I had, by mistake, blamed RentalCars.com and had sent them some emails. Even though this was cleared up, they were very positive although being blamed in error and were very kind when I apologized to them for blaming them in error. I forwarded the email response to CarRentals.com and received this response.
My email -
While on vacation I made a mistake and blamed rental cars.com. For your future reference, this is how an organization works to ensure repeat customers.
Their response
We are not "rentalcars.com." We are CarRentals.com.
Again, I'm not sure whether they are just stupid, or just not willing to care about their customers or their experience. I'm convinced it's the latter. I requested a number to speak with a supervisor and was not provided one. I asked for an apology for the rental car company subjecting my Grandmother to high heat and humidity and did not receive one. I hope that everyone who has a bad experience with these con artists places a post here so that economic darwinism can occur and drive these $^%@ out of business.
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