Hire cars and service

[IAmATeaf]

Way back when I used to regularly hire cars, I used to work in Edinburgh at the time but lived in London so every week from the airport I’d hire a car from Avis. Service was always fantastic and they really went out of their way to get me into a car on occasions where they were fully booked, all the cars were fairly new and I think I had 2 breakdowns over the 4 years that I did this and they promptly found me and swapped the car out.

My youngest son, as part of his job makes regular site visits and his company hires him a car for a day or 2, they have some sort of contract with Enterprise and from what I’ve seen their service is just plain shocking. They seem to ignore any instructions left by my son and turn up to drop or pick the car up when it suits them, so far they’ve done this on most of his rentals. His last car was a Prius which quite frankly had seen better days, each corner of the car had been in a scrape. He had a Vauxhall Grandland before where the management light was on, their advice was it does this, it overdue on its service by 2k miles, it should be fine! The tyres on the cars have been in a shocking state, he had a Seat with diff tyres on all four corners. Some of his car have been 4 years old, the Seat also had knocks and scrapes all over it.

Just today he is something like 300 miles away, driving back and they are pestering him to get back home before 12 as that’s when they shut, the hire started at around 2pm.

Told my son he’s being too soft with them, I’d have told them to fornicate off by now but is this really the state of hire car companies these days or are Enterprise just crap?

[alanm_3]

Enterprise (and National) have a very different business model to most of the other big rental companies in that they buy their cars, run them for 3 to 4 years before selling them on.
This seemed to work for them until COVID came along and the madness in the second hard car market started. So as a business decision, they ended up selling their cars, due to the vastly inflated prices they were fetching, only to not be able to then replenish them. Cue a complete lack of stock when you wanted to get a car.
It’s taken a very long time for them to regain a decent stock level.

[David_D]

Told my son he’s being too soft with them, I’d have told them to fornicate off by now but is this really the state of hire car companies these days or are Enterprise just crap?

I think he’s being too soft with his employer. He shouldn’t be required to be using vehicles of questionable safety. If he needs a car regularly, they should have a pool car or give him a company car.