The Day The Customer Service Died

Yesterday was a travel day from hell for me. I already blogged about the minor TSA nonsense, but that really was just sort of a small window into a day filled with really really bad customer service.

Step One: Hertz Car Rental, San Jose, CA

I left bright and early from Jeremy's house. It was a dreary, rainy, California day. (California having two types of days, "bright and sunny" and "dreary and rainy") As I pulled my rental car into the row of rental returns, I spotted the guy with the little handheld barcode scanner walking towards my car. You know the guy, he scans the car, asks you if everything was ok, and hands you a receipt.

Except this guy doesn't have a bar-code scanner, he tells me "go see the woman over there" (points at a small stand under the canopy near the main Hertz building). I cart my luggage over there, and ask her to check in my car. She asks for my rental agreement.

Now, in the procedure I listed two paragraphs ago, the original rental agreement never comes into play. They don't need it. They scanned your car, they know whose car it is, etc., etc. So I don't keep it handy at check-in. It's buried in my luggage somewhere with the paperwork and such from the trip, all kept together for tax write-off purposes later.

I tell her I don't have my paperwork handy. She tells me she can't check my car in without the paperwork. I tell her that in all the dozens of rentals I've returned before I've never needed my rental paperwork handy before. "Why don't you just go out there and scan the car like you would ordinarily do, and have done, every time I've ever returned a car to Hertz?"

"Because it's raining," she replies. Oh. My. God. Are you shitting me? It's not like downpour raining, it's a light mist, and isn't that this chick's freakin job?

Meanwhile, as we're having this conversation, the shuttle has pulled up to take people to the terminal. I tell her, "Well, the car is there, I'm leaving it there. I've got a plane to catch," and board the shuttle.

Step Two: American Airlines, San Jose, CA

After the plane departed the gate at SJC, it taxied off in some random direction, shut itself down and got awful quiet. The pilot came on to announce that we'd pulled away from the gate "because some other jet needed it", but that we would not actually be departing for another hour and a half.

Never mind that I only had an hour layover expected in O'Hare between the legs of my flight. Never mind that if they had said that this would happen before the plane left the gate, I might've tried to juggle my flights to go a different (non-delayed) route. Oh, and here's the kicker, because the plane left the gate at the right time, the hour-and-a-half delay still meets the FAA definition of an "on time departure".

They completely pissed all over their passengers, simply so that they could appear "on time".

Step Three: American Airlines, Chicago O'Hare and Newburgh, NY

When the plane finally arrived in O'Hare, I broke the land-speed record getting from one concourse to another. (And kids, watching the fat-man run across O'Hare isn't a pretty picture). Of course, while I managed to run down one concourse, across the terminal to another concourse, and then all the way down to the end of the second concourse, all without aid of any mechanized devices... my luggage, which had to move about 55' in a straight line, with three guys to help it, and a nice little truck to do it, couldn't seem to actually make the same distance.

I get to Newburgh, and lo and behold, there is no luggage there. This is only slightly more problematic than normal because -- wait for it -- my car and house keys are packed in one of my bags. I ask the baggage clerk "what now?". He tells me my bags will probably be on the 9:30 pm flight (about four hours later). I tell him that I am not sitting around the airport for four hours waiting for my bags.

AA: Well, you could go home, and then we could deliver them to you.
Me: How would I get home? I told you, my car keys are in the bags. Further, my house keys are right next to my car keys, so even if I got home, I couldn't get in the door.
AA: I could probably get you a cab voucher.
Me: Up to Saugerties, where my spare house-key is, and then back to Kingston?
AA: Yes.
Me: That might be do-able.
AA: How would you be coming back to pick up your luggage?
Me: You're asking me that? That's something you need to figure out. This whole thing is AA's mess, it needs to clean it up.
AA: Ah, ok, let me get a supervisor.
Me: OK.

The supervisor was like "I can probably get you the first taxi voucher, I might be able to get you the second, not sure how that would work." I explained to him that he should really just get me a rental car from one of the fine institutions over there against the wall, because it would certainly be cheaper than cab-fare up to Saugerties (45 miles), down to Kingston from there (15 miles), and then another Kingston-to-Newburgh run (30 miles). It simply made sense, economically, to get me a rental car, let me drive it myself to get my own spare key, and then I could come back later that night or this morning to return the car, get my luggage, get my keys, get my car, and go home.

Except, of course, that he's not authorized to save the company money. Seriously. The bureaucratic chains have bound him to only having available to him "taxi service". And the big-ass airlines wonder why they're going broke? I'll tell you -- it's because they don't give the front-line employees the abilities and authority to make decisions that will save them money. Not all your airports are in areas where cab-fare to local destinations is cheap, so don't lock your employees into what you think will always be the cheapest solution, let them decide that for themselves.

So I tell him, "Look, I'm not going to go home on the principle that you might be able to get me back here to get my stuff. If you can't guarantee me, right now, that AA is going to get me back down here to pick up my stuff, then you need to either authorize a rental car, so that I can get myself back here, or I'll rent it myself, and request a charge-back against my credit-card, and/or take it out of American's ass some other way, because I'm not going to get myself stuck thirty miles away from here with it suddenly my responsibility to pay a cab to get me back here. It wasn't your crew that made the mistake, but it was your company's, so somebody from AA needs to step up and take full responsibility.

He told me he couldn't do that, so I rented a car, and am now driving around in a Hyundai Accent that I plan to raise holy hell over with American.

Amusingly, I decided to be a prick, and "reward" them by making them deliver my luggage to me this morning. Even though I'm going to have to return the car today to the rental counter which is thirty-five feet from the baggage claim. They can deliver my luggage, like they're supposed to, and then I'll go pick up my car.

Ugh. What a nightmarish day.