There are two different fantastic customer service offerings from Enterprise and National, and I’ve always wondered why all the rental car companies don’t offer them also. They don’t seem like they can be patented, nor do they charge more money than their competitors for offering them:
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[li] Enterprise. “We’ll pick you up.” Awesome idea. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used them for that very reason. Why don’t all rental car companies do it? There’s Avis and Hertz mini-offices near my office, which is nowhere near an airport, so why can’t they come get me? Even if it’s b/c most companies are close to an airport, why give Enterprise all the non-airport business?[/li]
[li] National Car Rental. Pick your car from this row of similarly classed, but different car makers and different colors. Another awesome idea. If I don’t need to be picked up <g>, I always use National so I can get the faster, non-cop-bait-colored one. Again, why do I have to use the so-green-and-bright-I-wanna-puke Cavalier that’s assigned to me?[/li][/ul]
I realize these can probably be explained b/c they’re cost-prohibitive, but in my case, they’re losing my business, and their competitor isn’t losing their shirt by offering this service, so why don’t they?
Actually, I strongly suspect that in the first case, it may be a byproduct of Enterprise doing business in insurance rentals, i.e. your car gets wrecked, the insurer picks up giving you wheels for the week.
One more thing about Enterprise: they have the $9.99/day special weekend rental rate. Including taxes, if you reserve online to pick up your car early Saturday morning, then you’ve got a car for the whole weekend for less than $30. If you go Friday through Monday, it’s less than $50. If that’s the only time you need a car, then why buy one?
I will say this, though: Enterprise seems to be aggressive in selling its own in-house “insurance” (running something like $15 per day). When I tell them that I don’t need it because I have a combination of non-owners (for liability) and platinum card coverage (for all other damage), the representative sometimes gets a sour look on his/her face.
So I suspect it’s a mild form of bait and switch: you’re drawn in by the low weekend rate, but once you’re there you find out that you need to pay 2.5X as much because of the insurance–assuming that you don’t have nonowners like me.
“One more thing about Enterprise: they have the $9.99/day special weekend rental rate”
Yeah, you forgot to mention they only have a certain number of cars for that rate & they were out
of them when I asked. You also forgot to mention that Enterprise only goes a certain distance
to pick you up. They told me both of these things.
I’m hardly an advocate for Enterprise. OTOH, I didn’t “forget” to mention it because it’s never happened to me. Whenever they’ve run out of the $9.99 cars, they’ve given me a free upgrade–once I got to drive a minivan for the weekend, because that’s all they had left.
Well, their “certain distance” is much better than the “certain distance” of other rental car companies, which is zero.
As for the insurance thing, I’ve never noticed that they try and sell it any more or less than other rental companies, but that could be b/c my answer has always been an immediate “no” so maybe I didn’t notice. Still, it seems a small inconvenience for the luxury of getting a ride to and from their office…
Well, in my case, Enterprise honored their “we’ll pick you up” deal only grudgingly. I had totaled my car when some moron pulled out in front of me while I was doing 55, and the insurance company sent me to Enterprise for a rental. I called the closest office, which was 40 miles away, and they whined about having to send two guys out all that way to deliver the car. Couldn’t I come and get it? (Um, it’s 40 miles from here to there, as well as from there to here, morons. And I’d need to find a second driver, too, as well as A CAR!) I said no, and your ads say you’ll deliver the car, and so did my insurance agent. So get your scrawny asses out here with my car. (OK, so I didn’t use those exact words, but there was definitely a TONE.)
My wife works for National (which by the way is merging with Alamo in many cities so Alamo may start offering this service as well…) and she tells me that since National allows you to pick your own car, they have to stock around three times as many cars as the other companies. This is because, ironically, if people come to National and there’s not “enough” cars to choose from, they get mad. Never mind the fact that if they went down the street, they’d get no choice at all…
So National has found it needs to stock a lot more cars. For whatever reason, it works for them economically, but I can see that it wouldn’t necessarily work for every car rental company to switch to such a system.
I used to get my cars from Enterprise, but I found them much cheaper with other rental
agencies online. I also talked to a very rude Enterprise dude which was a real turn off.
Im surprised you got them to drive 40 miles to pick you up.
