Avis rent-a-car review
One star.
Maddie and I had to wait two hours to get a rental car despite having reserved one ahead of time. The connecting flight from Charlotte to Raleigh took less time than the time vortex that is Avis.
Starting the two hour delay, at 3:00 PM on a Carolina warm Saturday, the shuttle bus shuffled us and the other car-less cattle from the airport to the rental car lot. The mix of travelers consisted of business folk, vacation-ers, and Jerry, who hasn’t visited his parents in six years (which I only know because of my eavesdropping prowess). At the rental office, we all exited the bus and mooed “thank you” to the bus driver and waddled into the office.
The one-room office wasn’t the cleanest. I spotted zero trash cans but a pileup of random debris scattered on window seats, benches, and the floor, stained with random splotches of I can’t believe it’s not butter. The maze-like line weaved all the way from the door to the exhausted one-man staff. The entire lobby was filled with anxious travelers waiting for a car. It had a similar feel to the DMV, but somehow less hopeful. Maddie and I queued into line right after the sliding-glass entrance. The less fortunate folk had to wait behind us, outside in the North Carolina humidity.
Ignorant of the subject, one would assume that signing over a thirty thousand dollar vehicle would be an easy financial transaction - with each customer being served in 30 to 60 seconds - at least in ignorant theory. However at the Avis branch in Raleigh, per customer wait times clocked in closer to ten minutes. Of the twenty-some travelers in front of us, hardly any had bothered to print out their reservation on paper. Maddie tells me this is “old man behavior”; yet I don’t apologize for printing out and scrapbooking our entire travel itinerary - plane tickets, AirBNB details, and event tickets - because that’s just being fuel efficient with our travel energies. I’m sure there’s a way to access all the information through a cellular device, but that seems overly complicated.
At the end of the line of perturbed travelers, a single gate agent fielded the onslaught of vehicle rentals. All the while, more buses dropped off more car-less cattle, and the line started to snake around the building. Ironically, due to the influx of new line members, Maddie and I were relatively moving closer to the front of the line. But we can’t blame the overworked messenger for the slow pace; we can only blame the boys at Avis corporate.
It’s my personal opinion, along with the opinion of everyone in the line, that Avis management needs to retake the supply and demand portion of an econ 101 class. Just some helpful story problem math: If you have 50 people waiting in line and it takes 10 minutes to service a customer, and you want to serve all the customers in a reasonable timeframe, how many clerks should you hire? One is an incorrect answer.
Posted throughout the line were several permanent signs apologizing for the long wait times - apparently this was a recurring problem. The bags under the agent’s eyes and his defeated tone of voice could definitely attest. At one point a car jockey radioed in, telling the attendant that “You’re the only one in the building”; to which the agent loudly responded, loud enough for the entire lobby to hear, “Oh, I’m well aware.”
During the one hour fifteen minutes of waiting, we day dreamed about our trip, signed up for the Avis app (to see if we could speedline the process with the “click and go” feature; unfortunately no, their system was down), and got the life story of the traveler behind us, a nice old man from the coast. The old man and I bonded over both having attended UNC. I pretended to know all the bars he referenced (a blank part of my college resume) but was able to offer more color to our discussion on Carolina athletics and the ever increasing academic buildings. The white-beared old man also told us about his twenty five years in the air force and his experience at the Kentucky Derby himself. The nice conversation helped to not make the line feel so long.
After we finally made it through the Avis gauntlet - remember I had printed our confirmation, so it sped things along - we skipped out the office and found our assigned car at parking spot E23, a taxicab yellow Kia Soul. Normally, neither Maddie or I would choose such a dominant color, but we welcomed the surprise as a fun vacation color. The car smelt nice and looked newly detailed. We both high fived each other, blasted pop radio, and drove off the rental lot. When we got to the exit, the sign-off guard genuinely asked, “Is this a rental car?” (the color probably throwing him off), to which we laughed about later. Things were finally looking up and vacation had started.
Two minutes on the road, we received a dashboard warning message of a flat tire… Maddie drifted to the side of the road, clicked the hazards, and I hopped out to confirm the disappointing news. We’d waited in line for 75 minutes for a faulty car. Angry and exhausted, we circled the airport to return to the Avis rental lot. Round two.
Instead of trying the godawful line a second time, we hunted down a car jockey, one of the staff members on the lot in charge of cleaning and repairing returned cars. During the hunt, I waved hello to the old man from earlier and explained our troubles. Having survived the line himself, he completely understood the Avis MO. In fact all the folks from the Avis rental line now share a sacred bond, similar to a band of troops who’ve fought in a war together. We’re currently working on scheduling the ten year reunion.
Fairly quickly, Maddie flagged down someone who could help us. In the middle of the lot, at the Avis hut (roughly the size of a snow cone shack) the helper updated our details and exchanged our flat tire for a new car, a crimson red Chrysler Vroom. (I don’t know the actual model of the vehicle; the only car model I know by heart is my dream car, a 2003 Subaru Outback.)
End of the story, the car wasn’t as good. They hadn’t cleaned it beforehand. It smelt like a YMCA and sported lots of random scuff marks. There were so many scuffs that you could win the alphabet game fairly quickly. This is the final straw that brought down my review from two stars to one star.
