David Politis

Re.:  If you want my continued business, please fix your Website.

Ronald L. Nelson

Chairman & CEO

Avis Budget Group, Inc.

Dear Mr. Nelson:

I choose to use a debit card for most of my electronic payment transactions. Apparently, certain Budget Rent A Car locations do not accept debit cards for payments, which is fine. At the same time, however, many Budget Rent A Car locations do accept debit card payments.

As a result, such a nonsensical, on-again, off-again policy where the traveler is left to decipher if/when a debit card is an acceptable form of payment is crazy — and very unfriendly to the customer.

When I arrived this past Friday at the Budget Rent A Car location for the San Diego Airport, I was told in a surly manner that “We don’t accept debit cards.”

When I asked, “Since when?” (as I have used debit cards many times at other Budget rental locations), I was simply told that this was the policy and that the only way I could use my debit card was to

• Provide a current utility bill (less than 60 days old) addressed to the same address as my debit card billing address;

• Present a current passport or military identification;

• Produce a current vehicle insurance card; or

• Present a round-trip airline ticket, e-ticket or travel itinerary for your current travel disclosing a return date and the renter’s name.

Unfortunately, I do not carry any of the above-listed items with me when I travel domestically, and I now use my BlackBerry for keeping track of my travel itinerary. Unfortunately, this was not sufficient, and the only way I could rent a car from Budget in San Diego was to provide my confirmation number to the counter clerk and have her look it up in the backroom.

All told, instead of taking my average of three-to-five minutes at a rental car counter, I ended up wasting 20 minutes. No, I was NOT HAPPY! 

As crazy as it seems to me to sometimes accept a debit card with no hassles and then at other times require a traveler to jump through all sorts of hoops to be able to use a debit card, it’s a company’s prerogative to do so, whether I think it’s whack or not.

However, these policies are not easily found on the Budget Website; in fact, you have to go looking for them to even find out that they exist, and even then it’s not perfectly clear whether some locations accept debit cards or not.

I finally found the policies under the Debit Card User Instructions section.

Here is my suggestion, Mr. Nelson.

Unless you have Neanderthals supporting Budget’s Websites, it should be quite easy to create a simple Web-based, pop-up window that would appear anytime a prospective customer was about to complete a rental reservation at the San Diego airport. The language in this pop-up window could simply read as follows:

Please be advised that we do NOT accept debit cards as payment at this location without additional identification or information. Please click here for a list of such required information/identification. We apologize for any inconvenience this might cause you and thank you for your continued patronage.

This way, any time a traveler made a reservation at a Budget reservation that does not EASILY accept debit card payments, he/she would know in advance of the policy and could make arrangements in advance to prepare for such additional requirements.

If, for some reason, your personnel or external partners/agencies are unable to write the software code necessary to complete this simple task, please let me know and I’ll be happy to refer you or your colleagues to some programmers who can do so.

For the record, I have been a long-time Budget renter, and I hope to continue to be a Budget customer in the future. (My RapidRez number is GE352C.)

Thank you for your time and consideration. I look forward to avoiding such auto rental hassles in the future with Budget Rent A Car.

Sincerely,

David Politis

c/o Politis Communications

&

SOAR Communications

“Maximizing corporate value
thru strategic communications”
801-523-3730: work
801-523-3750: fax
801-556-8184: cell
dpolitis@politis.com: email

poppa.p@soarcomm.com: email
www.TheBettyFactor.com: blog
www.UtahTechWatch.com: blog

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 20th, 2008 at 7:03 pm and is filed under Politis Perspective, THUMBS DOWN!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.