When I’m at the counter the whole thing never seems to take more than a few minutes. It’s always quick, and smooth, and I’m out of there, seemingly, in no time at all.
I desperately want to know what other people are saying or doing at the rental car counter.
That said, I think I've only used an ATM 3x in the past year, so this may mostly be a thing of the past now.
I was very damn efficient considering how much I was doing, but it still took a decent amount of time.
In Poland, I've seen a real-life check only once in my whole adult life (past ~20 years). Any amount, literally from $1 to $10M+ is being sent by a wire transfer, and wire transfers cost $0-$0.25 flat fee, arriving within the same working day, or instant.
This is how it has worked for the past 20 years, and the more recent innovation is having a similar system working all across Europe, and instant transfers within the same country.
Depending on a bank's security policy, the only difference between amounts is that some banks won't allow you to send wires above a certain amount from mobile, and with some banks you have to appear in person for wires above say $50k.
In the US, sending money to another person's account, especially as an individual, is a difficult process, often requiring giving long account and routing numbers that many of us were told not to give out. It also takes several days to process, and sometimes has fees of $25-30. Also some banks have limitations allowing you to do transfers only to accounts where the name matches.
While many major banks have an online transfer system (eg, Zelle), this is far from being universally supported (my bank is not a member) and many people don't have it setup. Also the transfer limits might be low.
Other options like Venmo or Cash require both sides of the transaction to have an account. They also don't work well outside of friend-to-friend interactions.
My understanding is the US is due to replace the current clearing house system with one up to modern standards, but we'll see how that goes.
I get there probably isn't a single answer to this, BUT WHY? The US is a mature, skilled economy with a competitive B2C market, why does it still lag behind even comparable countries in terms of consumer financial infrastructure?
In US even the idea what there are could be some nation-wide (ie federal) registry of it's own citizen could get you pitch-forked. US still doesn't have a national-wide internal ID, and for the thing what essentially replaced it in function - driver's ID, every state has it's own format and idea what should be in it. It is not uncommon to hear what for something what requires ID (like buying alcohol or entering a nightclub) the people out of state would be barred from doing so because the clerk doesn't recognize the driver's ID of some other state and thinks it is a fraudulent one.
Most European countries have it easy, compared to the US, having a single law across the country and one citizens registry, or at least something much closer to it than the US.
Add to this a whole "embarrassed millionaire" mentality and a total unwillingness even to acknowledge the need for a change.
For the last one see any thread on Reddit where sane^W any non-American asks why US shops can't write the final price on the tag already.
I give you my account number. No risk to me. You can't take money from my account. You can only put money into that account.
No statewide ID or anything like that is needed by anyone for this system to work.
Checques work the opposite. I give you permission to take money from my account with a piece of paper. Very risky!
"Sure but now everyone can track me down with my account ID! [Which is of course in the number of The Devil!11]" - the guy who has SSN.
I wasn't clear in my previous post, but statewide ID isn't needed for the consumers, of course, but behind the curtains this is still much a bank to bank wire transfer, just using a different protocols. One of the attack vectors is making an account, filling it with money (eg stolen from the other accounts) following with the cash out and begone in the wind. With the near instant money transfers it would means it could be done VERY fast and nobody (except criminals) would be happy if that could be done easily. Having an account tied to your nation-wide ID means you can do it only once and then you have painted a target on your back by yourself. Of course there are SSN, KYC and other things, but aside from FBI's Most Wanted (joke) there is amusingly small list of things one US state entity can know about entity of other US state.
It is also always helpful to remember to treat US not as a country but as an association of countries under a single flag and currency. That way it would be much easier to answer multiple "WHY in America...." questions.
But is this materially any different to other federations, like Australia, Germany, and Canada (who’s provinces generally have significantly more autonomy than US states)?
One of the nation-wide IDs actively in use is the tuple (state, driver_license_number).
This is the disconnect. There are only a couple of national banks, and they are all crappy in their own important ways. This was largely the same in the UK until Mon{z,d}o came along and banks had to treat user experience as a source of competitive advantage seemingly overnight.
Paym, which allows transfers using mobile numbers is available with most high-street banks, but notably, not the fintech banks has been available since 2014. So arguably the fintech banks are behind the curve here, likely to try and drive some sort of network effect to increase friction of transferring money to customers of other banks.
Were the existing banks processes, apps & websites janky before the likes of Monzo came about? Sure, to varying extents. But the actual method of making transfers between accounts hasn't been influenced at all by the new banks, they're all using the existing structures that everybody was using before.
Wow. Here in Russia you only need a phone number, and when you enter it all the banks that recipient uses are automatically shown to you when you, it takes about 5 second and is completely free.
If the recipient wants to withdraw the cash in less than 30 days after receiving the payment, the bank may request documents that prove compliance with anti-laundering regulations. If you fail to provide such written documents then the bank will charge a fee of about 5-10%.
Also it is not secure because anyone who has your phone number can learn in what banks you have accounts. And if you have an account in Sberbank, anyone can lookup your name by your phone number. Very convenient for criminals and scammers.
The US is similar with amounts over $10,000. Structuring transactions to avoid that number is also forbidden.
Writing a check instead won’t avoid that since the account and routing number are printed right on it
Because people like the assurance of a check, or a receipt, or a payment confirmation.
How do you initiate a wire transfer? Seems like you would need to know a lot about the recipient -- their bank and account number, for starters -- to be successful. Sure you could do it on a mobile device but seems a lot more time consuming than writing a check. Privacy concern as well.
What happens if the transfer fails or doesn't go through, for whatever reason? If you hand the recipient a check, they have physical proof that you intended to pay them, and they know the payer's bank and account number. What recourse, proof, or evidence does the recipient have for a failed wire transfer?
How do B2B transactions work? Is it all wire transfer or do they pay each other with checks? In the USA, a huge percentage of consumer payments have migrated from checks to debit/credit cards (with near-instant confirmation), but companies still use tons of checks via standard postal mail all the time.
If you receive an invoice to pay, it will have the correct account number on it. Also, nowadays, many merchants include a QR code that makes payment with mobile banking app much easier. You just start the app, it activates the camera, reads the image and all you have to do is confirm the transaction. Very fast and with few possibilities to make a mistake.
Landlords will give you their account number as well, it is usually written in the contract.
If transfer fails, it is your problem. I am not sure how Americans handle bounced checks, but if someone gave me a check that I was unable to clear, I would suspect them of fraud.
B2B is mostly wire transfers and sometimes credit cards. Bookkeepers prefer wire transfers, because matching them to invoices is usually trivial nowadays. Any good accounting program will do that for you.
As for privacy, I would feel a lot more comfortable giving someone my account number (they cannot really do anything bad with it) than my postal address. And if your business is a VAT payer, its account number will be publicly listed by the tax authority anyway.
For most of Europe transfers are instant. So you’ll know if you’ve been paid or not pretty much immediately because you get a push notification confirming the payment within seconds of someone hitting send.
What is more assuring then the actual payment itself, transferred to you just as you talk?
> How do you initiate a wire transfer? [...] -- their bank and account number, for starters
Ugh, 21st century says hi.
Just a mobile number, some provider independent number, like SEPA [0] or in some circumstances just the plain plastic card number, be it a debit or a credit one.
> Sure you could do it on a mobile device but seems a lot more time consuming than writing a check
Scribbling something on the paper and taking it to the ATM/bank (or use said mobile to "online check it", oh irony) is sure to take more time than punching in some number in mobile or web app and actually transferring money.
Just to give you an idea how quaint it seems to many of us to hear about checks.
I really rarely use them but they are honestly pretty useful as a fallback to pay someone you trust (family, friend). It takes seconds to write, your grandmother knows how it works, it doesn’t require smartphone/a computer/a complex banking application, It doesn’t require communicating your bazillion characters long banking information, everyone accepts it for little sums, it works offline, it doesn’t require holding large amount of value, it’s easy to cancel if needed.
Yes it’s the least practical payment method and yes anything is better. But it always works where the rest doesn’t.
Mortgage company
DMV
County tax collector
Roofing company
Pest control company
Child daycare
Air conditioning company
School PTA
Landscaping company
Kid's gymnastics lessons
Pet rescue organization
Dues for a hobby organization
A large-ish cheque is $500-$50 000. Larger amounts would generally go through wire transfers.
Personally, I have never written a cheque, and have only had to purchase a money order once for an rental apartment damage deposit. But I have received plenty of cheques, either from work I've done for small businesses, or as regular paycheques before I set up direct payments with my employer.
I used to think like some here, that cheques are obsolete and anyone who uses them is dumb. But I was wrong; they serve a purpose, and there is no harm in them sticking around.
The reason the US banking system is so relatively slow and manual compared to foreign systems is that the US has never felt a need to create a cheap and efficient federal electronic check clearing system. The US is a capital generating superpower and a marginal improvement in banking would be a drop in the bucket. Most other countries either need quick and efficient banking to maintain their capital generating industries or quick and efficient banking is their industry.
Is that still widely used? I think manual transfer orders have largely been replaced by direct debit (companies taking the money you owe them straight from your bank account).
It's widely used by older people to receive pension and pay rent/utilities (these people often don't have access to internet banking, or don't know how to use it, or don't trust it), and by all other age groups to receive social security money (these people are often unable to have a bank account or would have their money taken from the account due to "executions" - payment orders forced on them by courts).
It depends on how much you trust that company with taking the right amount of money out of your account. Both fraud and honest mistakes on their side are your risks, even though they might be very low risks in practice.
SEPA (European) direct debit payments can be reversed with about two clicks in your online banking environment. No questions asked. I believe you have three months to do that, or even longer if the company doesn't have your handsigned signature approving direct debit.
Of course, the company on the other side may not be happy, and may be sending you bills and threats. But that's no different when refusing to pay without direct debit. And yes, it's up to you to notice any errors. I haven't heard of any cases of outright fraud using this system, though it probably happens.
- there are fees and commissions for using a card, and there are limits on how much cash you can withdraw daily/monthly
- bank also charges the merchant and it makes prices higher for everyone
- bank knows what and where you buy, collects this information and can resell it
- your name is written on the card and encoded inside, so when you pay the merchant can identify you
- cards have a magnetic tape that is unencrypted, can be easily copied. It seems like the only use for this tape is to allow criminals to copy the card.
- new cards include RFID label that allows reading data about you and charge your account
- if you are suspected to be an "extremist", then the bank will allow you to withdraw only about $150 per month. And you can become a suspect if you post something wrong on the Internet.
Cash is obviously better.
There aren't for you as a customer. Yes, a bank would require the acquiring fee for each transaction but it's already in the price of the item both for the cash and the card.
> it makes prices higher for everyone
While true deep down there, the price of item is usually still covers all the things including returns, inventory spoilage, breakage and shoplifting. Acquiring fees are ~1-2% so most of the time they don't even register over a markup.
> bank knows what and where you buy, collects this information and can resell it
Most people are just fine with using an affiliate cards... which are used for exactly the same.
> your name is written on the card and encoded inside, so when you pay the merchant can identify you
Your card number is a way more unique identifier than some John Doe.
> cards have a magnetic tape that is unencrypted, can be easily copied.
Everyone (except US) moved from tape to chip and paypass systems which are way more secure.
> new cards include RFID label that allows reading data about you and charge your account
Only the card number and it is limited for small amounts.
> if you are suspected to be an "extremist", then the bank will allow you to withdraw only about $150 per month
This is the only thing where cash is obviously better for an ordinary person.
I guess it depends on the bank or on the country. In Russia some banks have a small fee (usually about $1-$2 per month) for using a debit card, some don't have and some will charge a fee unless you spend more than a certain amount every month or deposit a specific amount. There can also be a small fee for issuing/reissuing a card.
Then there are indirect costs. You will probably want to receive SMS notifications when your account is debited or credited, and this is not free for cards that don't have a monthly usage fee. There can even be a fee for withdrawing funds from a debit card (using issuer bank's ATM).
Recently I read through different banks' terms and there are lot of things they can charge you for. For example, one bank will charge a fee for counting coins or small bills if you bring too much of them. Or there can be a fee for withdrawing money in bank's office below certain limit.
Generally, it seems that banks don't like customers who don't pay a fee - directly or indirectly (when making a purchase).
Well, everyone everywhere wants a small fee for everything. Look at the cellular networks/providers... Although $1-2 is honestly cheap enough to have the convenience of cash-less operations.
> unless you spend more than a certain amount every month or deposit a specific amount
Amusingly this is exactly what I have right now, but I only discovered it pretty recently. Years ago it was really free for me because it was the company which footed the bill, but I don't work there anymore.
> There can even be a fee for withdrawing funds from a debit card
People should vote with their wallets against such practices. And honestly that should be illegal, but...
> one bank will charge a fee for counting coins or small bills if you bring too much of them
If I understand this properly this is against the law, at least if you are paying for something.
> it seems that banks don't like customers who don't pay a fee
Which is unsurprisingly because they are "for profit" institutions.
1) paying my maid / house help
2) buying drugs
3) tips at restaurants / hotels
Also often traveling to 3rd world countries / somewhat corrupt locales. In these cases I make sure to have cash for bribes when the police invariably decide to shake me down.
A few months ago (in 2021!) I moved, so my old insurance had to reimburse some €40. While they never had any issue with getting paid directly from my bank account, for some reason they couldn't do the reverse and had to send a check.
All our banks (NZ) stopped issuing cheque books and accepting cheques over 2020 - 2021. There were some rather elderly people who were inconvenienced, but the banks were pretty good at helping them adjust.
And it has been a very long time since anyone really accepted payment in cheque form - just due to the crime associated - back in the days when new chequebooks were mailed out to customers, criminals would routinely check mailboxes for letters that felt like a chequebook.
Coming from the EU I was shocked to find out that a lot of the B2B payments for small and mid size companies - are done sending checks in the mail.
Routing and account numbers are considered sensitive information, and normally hidden on online banking. My understanding is that these can be used to transfer money out of the bank account.
even at grocery self-checkout, the quirks of a given checkout machine get embedded in my brain so that i gravitate toward the quickest route through. produce lookup and weight vs. count are usually the biggest stumbling blocks. one nice trick is that the credit card terminal is independent from the checkout flow, so you can do those more-or-less in parallel towards the end.
If one comes, say, every 15 minutes, that's an average waiting time of 7.5 minutes (and there's a +/- of around a minute for whether the 'time' is arrival, doors opening, closing, departure, depending on one's perspective of which 'time' is important to them).
If one's already there, or comes within 1-2 minutes, that's perceptively close to time = 0, which pushes out perceived average waiting time to 8-9 minutes with times approaching or exceeding average waiting time having a disproportionately negative perception (your total journey time/connection impact, expectation of unannounced cancellation, etc, increasing).
Nifty modern stuff like indicator boards work to re-align these perceptions.
Passage of time is also quite non-linear - back to the ATM queue. When using the ATM I'm engaged in a series of short-term tasks, just as writing a comment on HN when sitting on the subway causes stations to pass 'faster'.
And back to the ATM - I'm sure there's someone somewhere in a retail banking team that measures average interaction with ATM timings. Do they read HN or would like to comment?
> SOME years ago, executives at a Houston airport faced a troubling customer-relations issue. Passengers were lodging an inordinate number of complaints about the long waits at baggage claim. In response, the executives increased the number of baggage handlers working that shift. The plan worked: the average wait fell to eight minutes, well within industry benchmarks. But the complaints persisted.
> Puzzled, the airport executives undertook a more careful, on-site analysis. They found that it took passengers a minute to walk from their arrival gates to baggage claim and seven more minutes to get their bags. Roughly 88 percent of their time, in other words, was spent standing around waiting for their bags.
> So the airport decided on a new approach: instead of reducing wait times, it moved the arrival gates away from the main terminal and routed bags to the outermost carousel. Passengers now had to walk six times longer to get their bags. Complaints dropped to near zero.
You get to partake in a half-marathon, dragging along your jetlagged kids and your numerous bags, jackets, etc. It’s a excellent example of optimizing for metrics instead of optimizing for people.
Imagine your hotel moving the valet service from downstairs to a parking lot two miles away. You tell the reception desk you need your car, and sure enough, your car is ready by the time you’ve made the walk.
Imagine being so detached from reality that you think making your passengers take an extra 20-minute walk around the terminal is an elegant solution
It seems like the opposite. The change directly led to less complaints from people. It's more like optimizing for human comfort rather than giving people what's supposedly best for them via an objective metric. Though I'd say even more specifically (assuming the story is even true) it's optimizing for keeping the small percentage of squeaky wheels comfortable.
Less complaints about waiting time, that is.
> there is no such thing as a separate gate for arrivals
You might be surprised. In many of the newish airports I've been to (outside the US) the gates are designed such that arriving and departing passengers for the same aircraft never bump into each other.
They do this by clever design; immediately after exiting the aerobridge and onto the terminal building, there's a split (staircase or a sloping walkway) of some kind. So, the departing and arriving passengers are on different floors.
The passengers from international flights must be routed through border control first.
If they had given customers information about _when_ their luggage would be available for pickup, the complaints would probably also have dropped to zero.
Intuitively, think of throwing a dart at the time line. We are more likely to hit the line in the bigger gaps between buses’s arrivals than between buses that arrive close to each other.
Boom, everyone's happy. Your repeat customers are more likely to stay that way, and people will hear about this and _become_ repeat customers because that's what it incentivizes. You can keep prices cheap by overbooking your non-loyalty cars like you already do.
The interesting part is WHY for some people it takes so long that everybody else has to wait.
Imagine being on a high speed train and having to travel at the speed of the slowest train in front or if e-mail were sent using snail mail.
It obviously happens frequently enough that virtually everyone who ever rented a car - even only that one time - noticed it, so why they do not optimize for that?
I used to rent cars very often and I had to wait every single time I went there, it's not really a bias, it's a certainty.
Lately there have been some improvements on that front and a couple of the major rental companies made it almost painless if you are a regular customer, but it's still a lottery most of the times.
Some people seem utterly unprepared. They either don’t have their info at all, or have to login to their web mail, or find some printed paper at the bottom of their enormous suitcase. And then they tend to have tons of questions. I check out the facilities beforehand online so I know what to expect and how to use them.
Instead, after waiting about 15 minutes for the single person ahead of us in line to be processed, we were met with a series of demands for various sorts of verification and documentation that has not been mentioned in the online checkout process. This included having to use a .gov.uk website to get a code that would allow the company to validate our driving licences, and provide a proof of address (despite our addresses being printed on our government-issued, just-verified-authentic driver's licences.)
The whole process took nearly half an hour just at the desk. I am glad that there was no one waiting in line behind us most of that time.
I've now joined ZipCar and will hopefully never have to deal with a traditional car hire company again.
None of this applies to non-U.K. residents, which probably make up the majority of customers, so the rental website usually put all these details in the fine print.
Also while your looking at Zipcar (which is great) also take a peek at Virtuo. Only place I’ve ever enjoyed renting a car from.
Tip: Do your research and read the fine print online before you leave for your trip.
And if you miss one: You gotta tab all the way until it wraps around and back to where you were.
The systems are often blazing fast underneath, but these crazy tab-forcing-90s-looking-UIs are stupidly common in airlines, car renrals, part ordering, smaller banks and anything else that started using centralized computer systems early but didn't expose those systems to end users.
I hate web forms that don't support tab key navigation between fields.
You'll have plenty of fun with 500-900ms delay added by a crappy Java front-end and even if it's on the shorter end consistently you'll love the odd 900ms bump for the screen scraper refresh making you hit twice since the crappy rubber dome keyboard doesn't register way too often.
Then back to tabbing through 20 fields until you stop at the right one again!
We're not talking quick modern UIs here, but screen capturing an old virtual terminal window hosted at headquarters, with OCR and color matching, all developed by some consultancy who went bankrupt in 2000, and because of how much depends on the legacy system noone dares to fix what's technically working.
It's a humbling environment to end up in as a young dev for sure. You'll be very disappointed that one guy in 1999 didn't think reversing would be needed.
Uh, but why? If there's old virtual terminal just connect to it with SSH, why bother with screen scraping that only makes it worse?
If I can book it through the web (hence, they have a web frontend) they could have though of something better in the last 10 years
Or, you know. Make shift-tab work. And use a faster terminal emulator
You can build a web interface separately (external contract ofc) and that will work in parallell, but aside from very basic services there are tons of edge cases, bad documentation, business customers with systems built with yours as a dependency. It's a little like any bank old enough still having paper file storage and the planned end of life is the literal death of all paper holding customers.
So the old system sticks around and as long as it does noone wants to buy a new set of computers to run in parallell with the old ones.
There are companies who try hard and end up sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into replacing old systems that only cost a server blade, ten devs and five people in operations to run.
With no clear benefit visible to the shareholders far from all of them have even started that move.
If many people have an issue with the UX paradigm, which is more likely, that they all are wrong, or that the one thing in common is the thing that's suboptimal?
Sort of like how prior to barcode scanners in cash registers at supermarkets, the person working the till would become familiar using a numeric keypad fast, as well as with the prices of often-bought items.
There is a time and place for good ol keyboard driven UI. Don’t throw the baby with the whole bathtub.
I’d argue that most modern UI/UX sucks but that’s debatable. But legacy UI is fricking amazing in some cases.
Also: Shift + Tab can be implemented and it would solve your gripe.
Most modern UI/UX sucks because frontend has no discipline, in that a third the people seem to be random students pulled off the street getting drafted in and another third are backend people getting drafted in, and it's debatable IMO which is worse.
DECForms actually allowed for the programing of very spiffy user interfaces, which worked very well on VT terminals. Input could be handled extremely fast and efficient by a (semi-) experienced user.
You probably meant Mainframe terminals, which had no ability to handle asynchronous key input, but where you could only send complete pages to the mainframe.
Source: I worked with both. Moving from Unisys 1100 mainframes (and all their horrible utilities) to VAX and VMS was an epiphany.
I'd still argue that a lot of VMS software was actually better and handled better than the bloat we have to deal with nowadays.
But in both cases it's "awesome cool new user interfaces" made some time in the past to try to make the terminals easier to use for staff at sales locations.
Very hyped about OpenVMS 9, but will probably migrate myself over to being a more generic developer =)
When I return cars at my local Enterprise it's so absurd. I have to park the car to then go into a little house where I wait in line to talk to a guy in a suit who then runs out to check on the car to then come back in and tell me we are all set. Hertz at SFO had people with iPads where you park the car and you are out in under a minute. Why doesn't Enterprise fire half the guys in suits and put the remaining ones in yellow vests into the parking lot and get rid of the little building?!
This industry couldn't seem more ready for disruption.
I suspect the reason the counter is there is to upsell people, and that car rental companies make significantly more money because of that bad experience. But god, I would and do pay a premium to not have to deal with that crap.
I used to use Drive Now as they were in ‘Europe’ (I.e. geographically spread across the continent) and they were even at the airport in Helsinki. Then they pulled out of London and Helsinki (and others) where they had been ubiquitous claiming that it was un-profitable. Before that it was ideal though as you could unlock a car at any airport or city with the same app, credit card, agreement etc. And the cars were basically identical too!
Now I have no desire to sign up for a different app/service etc in each city in a language I probably won’t understand and have to get familiar with how they operate (where can you park it, for how long, etc) so it’s back to the familiar rental car desks.
But my point was more that there's no structural reason for the rental friction, other than to upsell people. The risk profile, and things that need to be handled are basically identical for car sharing and car rental, and car sharing makes the process seamless, while car rental makes it intentionally annoying.
It would indeed be great if they could bring this new way of operation to those too.
I know specifically a lot of my friends who basically fall into that category: don't own a car, and decide same-day that they want to do a weekend trip, and would rather pay €20 more to not deal with contract, aggressive up-selling, pick up and drop off, refueling, inspection, etc.
Of course, multi-day long road trip in another country that I plan in advance, hit up Kayak and the major agencies, no question.
I also have to admit that probably 90% of my annoyances comes from a mental issue I have where it really, really bothers me when I think something could be more efficient than it is, when I'm not impacted.
The car belongs to a car sharing company. In Munich for example there is Share Now, Miles, Sixt Share, and some specialized ones. The cars are parked all over the city in normal parking spots on the side of the road. Using the app, you find the closest one, usually you'll find 2 or 3 within 500 meters (strongly depending where you are). You select it in the app, walk up to the car, use the app to unlock and are ready to go.
They are usually paid by the minute, but there is also packages for multiple hours or days. But I think for renting over multiply days, normal car renting is better. Sixt is pretty good. Takes no more than 5 minutes to pick up the car. You don't reserve a specific type, but a class of car. And when I reserve the cheapest class, until now I was upgraded to the higher class every single time. They even have a "Lucky Class" which will explicitly get you whatever they have available, up to the really nice ones.
Inside of the city, they can be parked in any public parking (mostly on street), and you can find them in the app. Just checked, to give a point of reference, and there are two cars available within 200 meters of my apartment, and 7 available within 500 meters. There are also special parking lots at the airport where car sharing cars park.
You can also have one delivered to you at a particular time, but that costs €30, and makes it where a taxi would be cheaper.
Then we switched to Avis and now I have to wait at the counter for someone to help me. Last time I traveled I had to wait like 20 minutes because the line was long. I hate it so much.
I’ve literally had Avis come and get a vehicle that I still had a week left on its rental from a hotel parking lot…and still can’t get an explanation from Avis as to why (or, even better yet, why they charged me for that extra week!)
Yes! It makes no frickin' sense in an age of internet booking, and this is why I, too, use Hertz Gold. As much as Hertz was raked over the coals in that recent Twitter post (seemingly justifiably), I have generally have pretty good experiences with them and hope to never again stand around at a counter having a moronic experience instructing somebody else to re-type all the information I've already typed in when I made the reservation in the first place.
- walk up to counter - announce my name - show my driving license - get handed the keys - get told where the car is - say goodbye
Total time, roughly thirty seconds.
Even in a UK airport where there will quite likely be a queue the actual transaction will only be a few minutes.
Its weird they wouldn't drive 150km to learn how to save sooo much time, not just the customer but also their own labour costs.
And this is CI/CD done right. As soon as they commit a bug fix, the very next customer can use it.
The terminal was unresponsive and displaying the following error: "cannot connect to mainframe" (This was in 2019).
They're also seemingly cost-optimizing by advertising car A, and then hoping to give you an "or similar" car B at less cost to themselves. Sometimes in a way that blatantly doesn't match their own advertising material.
E.g. I've rented something like a VW Passat or other mid-sized-wagon, only to have the car rental try to pass off compact the size of a VW Golf as "similar".
They'll then budge when you point out that the suitcases you've got won't fit in the Golf, and that their own website shows that the VW Passat could fit X amount of large suitcases, but won't fit in the "similar" car.
Then it'll turn out that they do actually have a car that a reasonable person would classify as "similar" to the car you booked right there on the lot. They might even have the exact model you booked to begin with!
I've also experienced "softer" versions of this where the 5-10 advertised cars in a given "similar" category clearly have 1-2 models that stand out as noticeably cheaper. Guess which models I got every time I rented there?
Not something you can/should complain about, since the models all similar to a VW Golf, but cases where it clearly wasn't about inventory management. Instead it's systematic "down-selling" via deceptive advertisement that conveniently omits the proportion of the fleet represented by each "similar" model.
This included being given a muscle car instead of small SUV (not practical for a kid and pregnant wife:), and a culminated in a chrysler 300 which I drove away about 150km, then drove back 150km because it was just so much Nope Nope Nope as a car. I waited at the counter until somebody drove in with a sane vehicle.
So I tend to believe the notion there's just no actual inventory management and assignment. You get what they have.
This exact thing happens to me all the time. One time the company tried to give me a car I have no license to drive (truck category instead of a van).
Other time I actually got upgraded by Enterprise to a nicer car but automatic instead of manual. I struggled to get out of the parking.
I suppose slow in relative terms.
I find a lot of rental "muscle cars" are in base trim with unresponsive transmissions (I got a challenger, charger, mustang and thunderbird in rental over the years... Plus the above mentioned chrysler 300 ugh) .
You put gas pedal down, and 1-2 or even 3 seconds later, the 2.5 tons of metal starts doing exciting sounding things. But it doesn't have the feel of a small responsive sport car some associate with "fast". And they tend to be wobblier in corners than some non sporty hatches with differently tuned suspension. This leads to the feel of "slow" even if ostensibly they have a thunderous v8 underneath somewhere :-/
"A pimp's love is very different from that of a square"
Logically, there's nothing wrong with a Chrysler 300, but emotionally, everything is wrong with a Chrysler 300.
And we humans happen to be emotional beings. Well...some of us.
For an actually useful comment, the original commenter seems to have left a good response.
1. It was huge and vast and over 5 meters long, but could not fit me - I am 188cm /6'2 and I had to bend my neck as it was too short in the cabin. With seat at lowest level. It did have a sunroof which I know impacts head space but for such a ridiculously long and non sporty car it was silly to shave few cm of needed head space. It also couldn't adjust seat and steering wheel in right proportion for my height - and while I'm tall I'm well on the easy part of bell curve.
2. I kept wondering if I'm sleepy or if there's a thunderstorm until I realized it had TINTED FRONT windshield. Didn't even think it was legal. It was definitely idiotic - I can't see outside as well as I should and other drivers can't see me as well as I should, especially since all other windows were even more heavily tinted - and this was a stock rental, not what some clueless teenager with disregard for reality did.
3.It had one of those wobbly knobs for gear shift. Ridiculous to operate, you have to look at screen to know which gear you're in. And so easy to dislodge! Yet, taking the same amount of space in the same spot as regular stick, so nothing gained and everything lost. (FWIW, I think there are gear stick alternatives that work, it's not like there's only "one true way" - e.g. Honda's system has supremely distinct look feel and feedback for each gear button and it's on dashboard so saves space; the Chrysler 300 knob is just clueless on all accounts).
4. It had a special spot for cell phone but it was already too small for current cell phones. And next to gear shift so when I went to reach for cell phone to stop it from falling, I changed gear.
I loved seeing the message "you're going too fast to engage reverse". The only thing stopping me from massive car wreck was a line of code written by cheapest bidding developer.
(again, long ago, but I think it had something like push down to get out of parking, but only soft detents for all other gears? It just felt scary and unresponsive and awful design; others must like it since it's there to this day:)
5. I don't remember details but I remember feeling there was complete lack of control. I don't think I could influence which gear it is in (higher trims may have had paddles but not this model). I don't think I could been choose rwd or awd mode. It had some stupid auto /as needed system. etc
6. Gauges area was colourful but I seem to remember the UI being poort. e. G. Huge picture of car but tiny little subtle colouring of wheels to show if it's in rwd or awd mode.
7. Too many things on touch screen as opposed to buttons. I forget details but I think I had to go two menus in to turn seat heater or change fan direction or something.
8. Did I mention it was more than 5 meters long (even though I couldn't fit into it), With horrible visibility? And darn near 4,500 pounds, with inertia and momentum to match. I think 300+ horses but nothing to show for it - you could overtake easily on highway in a straight line once you gave the car enough time & notice that you really actually wanted to do so, but completely unresponsive otherwise. It was a big lumbering beast and just not the car to drive in a new place as a sole occupant.
Overall just felt like an uncontrollable boat with awful milleage poor visibility horrible handling and impractical interior. The guy felt excited about the "upgrade" but after 2 hrs in it I realized I'd be steaming for the rest of the week and drove back to return it. My work colleague has one and adores it - wants to buy even bigger rims and washes it every weekend with love; though it may be an older model before the UI issues, to each their own - was not my cup of tea :)
Edit /Ps : fwiw and for calibration, car I ended up enjoying the most, unexpectedly, for business trip rental was... Chevy trax. Ridiculous underpowered stubby thing I'd never purchase, but it had superb visibility, short wheelbase, easy to get in and out of, intuitive control, predictable handling, good on milleage, easy to fit luggage in, easy to park. It was Great car for new places (note all of this was pre covid; WFH since)
They almost always try to upsell the better model before, like do you want automatic, no, do you want a bigger car, no, do you want navigation, no.
And then you get the big car with nav and automatic transmission.
you didn't have a screenshot, printout, or email with the reserved price clearly indicated? (on second thought, car rentals, especially at airports, generally have a huge markup due to airport facility fees, service fees, and local taxes -- but even that should have been clearly displayed on the confirmation you received at the time you made the reservation).
perhaps, although he said "booked" 3 times.
Searching for "Sixt bait and switch" returns a fair number of stories and reviews that are similar to my experience.
Gee, thanks.
Jetta is the sedan version of golf (roughly) and as a five seater it is full 50cm longer than golf. Passat is another 25 cm. It's just more car than golf.
(mind you, I'd always get a golf over Passat but that's precisely because I want a small car and don't need a cargo carrying boat :)
One time, I took the fast car because TINA and didn't notice how light the pedal was on a downhill section of the freeway and got a speeding ticket. So that "free upsell" cost me $350.
That's clearly another consequence of "You can book any car with any rental company and cancel up until the minute of the rental or just not show up and there's no penalty.": they've run out of the smaller cars and only have one larger one left (e.g., more than X% of the people with smaller car reservations showed up, but less than X% of those with larger cars - and if you think this through, I think you need to bias towards larger cars in your planning to avoid not being able to provide an at-least-requested-size car when the opposite case arises).
There is one way to avoid this, at least in my experience: be a business traveler. I've noticed a big difference in speed of service when traveling for business vs. traveling for personal reasons. I suspect that rental car companies know that business reservations are (a) much more reliable in terms of the person actually showing up for the car, and (b) much less likely to be able to change from the specific car type that's been reserved, since that's being determined by some corporation's booking rules rather than an individual's preferences.
OTOH, it takes nothing to sign up for the rental company's 'frequent renter' programs and that usually gets you access to a priority counter or line, which can save a lot of time when the regular counter is busy. Usually a car will be waiting for you when you get there, but depends on the facility and the busyness factor.
Yes, I've done that with most of the major rental companies, and I agree it does cut down on wait time considerably. My experience has been that the service itself still varies considerably by location (although I've still found it to be better when traveling on business). The vast majority of my rentals have been at airports and it's very hard to predict which ones will have better service; I've had very bad experiences at large airports where you would think they would have the process down pat, and good experiences at smaller airports.
The kicker is that episode actually aired just over 30 years ago (December 4th, 1991).
Same with rental cars. Everyone complains about reservations, but when push comes to shove people aren't actually willing to put their money where their mouths (and complaints) are.
And that includes me. I remember flying return from SFO to Barcelona for $500 on a budget international airline (Norwegian Air). No food service, no drink service, but it was a A380 fleet so quite comfortable. Read the fine print and you avoid all excess charges like printing tickets, bagged checkin fees, etc. Cheaper than flying return from SFO to NYC.
For those that aren’t willing to go cheap, there is now Premium Economy which seems to be growing in size as a class. I think Singapore Airlines now run flights that dont have basic economy any more. It’s either premium economy or business.
Honestly it never even occurred to me that anyone would care. On car hire websites they're pretty explicit that you're getting a certain kind of car, not an exact model.
If the entire industry, having raced to the bottom years ago, operates the same way, how is the unavailability going to hurt them in practice? You're still standing at their desk, needing a car.
Haven’t used it in quite a while due to Covid, but it was pretty cool booking for $40/day, then seeing it go down to $35, then $27, then $22 and finally $19. All automatically.
I'd just tell him that there's no cars, or something.
It still might not work, but as implementation approaches go, the business risks seem substantially different at least.
Am I being an idealist? Are the dark patterns and hidden costs mandatory to become profitable? What are the unit economics preventing from such a thing to exist?
Renting car is painful and stressful if you're not a business user (or high tier member).
Yeah it seems it'll be pretty rough and capital intensive entering the market, but it seems so obvious that I wonder why there isn't a company like Uber or Airbnb that VCs want to pour money into. Turo would be the obvious comparison but I don't think the same model can apply for cars.
Going by recent threads, it is more likely that you would be cancelled as a customer and still have to pay for your reservation.
Like, round the corner from me right now is a VW Golf. I can jump in it and drive it away immediately for €0.30 a minute (pricing is demand-based, it can be cheaper than that). No additional costs whatsoever, the only condition is I have to park it somewhere within their operating area when I'm done with it.
If I want to keep it for a few hours, or a few days, all I have to do is choose the appropriate tariff. A certain amount of kilometres is included, and I can buy more if needs be. Doesn't cost me anything to park it in the city while I have it. Sure, it gets a bit pricey, but that's the cost of convenience.
Traditional rental is a bit more complicated, but not hugely - book through the app, collect, return. Anything longer-term than that is available through a monthly subscription, which is certainly more expensive than a conventional lease, but everything's taken care of and you can hand it back any time.
It's all pretty painless.
I'm in Germany, which may obviously differ from the US, but here's what I see: In cities new app-based services that are much, much more convenient to use take over. But they're only available in large cities (and even there only in the inner part of the cities).
If you need a car from "small city X" to "small city Y" there's simply no company other than Hertz, Europcar and Sixt that can offer you that. And it's hard for any other company to create such a network of locations.
Uber car rentals is just a proxy for traditional car rental services like Hertz. All the aforementioned problems like reservation flakiness and weird fees applies.
On the other hand, Lyft car rentals is operated in-house and feels delightful in comparison. I usually reserve a few days before, take a Lyft to the fleet HQ with the provided credit, and roll out in <10m. Overall a super nice experience both times I’ve used it.
When I rented a BMW438i a few years ago I would have been severely upset if I had been offered a Toyota Camry instead. Similarly when I rented a rather nice Land Rover.
On the other hand I was not especially concerned when I didn't get the Skoda Octavia I had booked on another occasion; I was lucky then, I got a Mercedes C230 instead.
Literally yesterday I showed up at the airport, armed with two reservations for a mid-sized SUV. Neither company had one and both companies were the same parent. I ended up with a smaller car than I "reserved".
I would happily pay a non-refundable deposit at the time of making the "reservation" if that meant when I walked up to the counter, they would have the car I want.
I may be in the naive minority, however.
I do feel the remaining rental car businesses could live past their reluctance to enforce a partial reservation payment. A single day’s payment (for, say, one week’s rental) I feel is reasonable or $50.00.
Especially if it means better service, better cars, and a more consistent experience.
However, I only rent for vacations and I may be blind to the what the average renter demands/expects.
Is this some American thing? Every time I rented a car in Germany, I had to pre-pay at least some amount.
You’d have to find a palatable way to present it to consumers, but that seems surmountable, you’d just need to do some delicate copyrighting.
Competition brings out the best solution. The current system is the best overall solution. Most people don't really care what car they rent, and probably sometimes get an upgrade to a better car if they complain about not getting the car they reserved. By having this system, rental car companies can substantially reduce the cost of renting a car. It would be very expensive to intentionally have cars waiting on the lot for upcoming customers.
Here's one: One of the biggest frustrations people have is that it seems impossible to actually get the car you reserved. Seinfeld even has a whole schtick about this - why is it called a "reservation" if it's not actually....a reservation?
Reservations never work because the rental car companies don't enforce them. You can book any car with any rental company and cancel up until the minute of the rental or just not show up and there's no penalty. (Everyone forgets this part.)
If a rental car company actually treated reservations like reservations, then they'd hold your Toyota Camry for you and not give it to someone else. But then when you decide not to show up for your rental, the rental company would be stuck because they planned for you to show up and you didn't.
So they have two choices: Either assume there's only an X% chance you're going to show up and use that to roughly plan fleet availability for that given day (the current state of affairs which results in your not getting a car you reserved when X+10% of people show up that day instead of X%), or start penalizing people for not showing up so they can actually honor reservations.
And why don't they do that? Good 'ol competition. Everyone is afraid to start enforcing reservations because if Hertz does but Enterprise doesn't, people are going to book with Enterprise ("Book w/ us and never pay a penalty when your plans change!").
You will notice that they are tip-toeing into this -- lots of companies now offer discounts for pre-paid (non-refundable) reservations, but the no-penalty-for-no-shows-pay-at-the-counter option is still there. And until it vanishes, the reservation issue will still be there.