After my EECB to Avis the other day, I was pleasantly surprised when Scott Deaver, EVP/Strategy for Avis Budget Group got in touch with me.
He let me know that he was concerned that the pricing wasn’t competitive, asked me to provide them a little more info, and had an executive CSC get in touch with [...]
As I mentioned earlier, I’ve had it with Avis…here’s the letter I just sent the CEO outlining why:
February 2, 2009
Mr. Ronald Nelson, Chairman and CEO, AvisBudget Group
Dear Mr. Nelson,
I wanted to drop you a brief letter letting you know how AvisBudget has lost my business from this date on. As an Avis [...]
Avis decided to really jack their Avis First customers around with some new changes to the program. For those of you unfamiliar with Avis First, it’s Avis‘ version of elite airlines status. If you rent over 10 times or 35 days in a year, you get upgraded to Avis First. Benefits are along the lines [...]
Some time ago, Avis started giving you five iTunes downloads per rental which was pretty sweet. Nice bennie, and made it always easy to go back to Avis.
Fast forward a bit, and suddenly the codes you would get from Avis stopped working on iTunes…poking around Avis.com, you find that they’ve switched from iTunes to eMusic, [...]
I felt so honored by Hertz for inviting me (see below) into the President’s Circle (I’m guessing their equivalent of Avis First)…but the whole $450 “invitation fee” was such a buzzkill. Guess I’ll just stick to giving Avis my business since they already love me more than Hertz ever will (I am the biggest fan [...]
Some time ago, it seems that Avis quit giving out 5 iTunes songs per rental, and switched to eMusic. Obviously, there’s significantly less selection, but I got this lovely “explanation” from them today when searching for songs by Fergie:
Yeaaaah, I’m sure it’s because they’re popular and you want to keep independant music alive. It’s not [...]
Ok, let’s take a look at the receipt:
The rental fee was $168 for 3 days…fair enough. And I get the taxes (granted, the airport and the state of Kentucky are bleeding renters, but it’s not like Avis has a choice on charging me this), but what I don’t get are the $5.48/day fee and the [...]
So, imagine my pleasant surprise when I realized my latest rental from Avis was a 2007 FlexFuel Chevy Impala.
As I was walking to the back of the car, I saw this on the trunk:
And I thought it was pretty sweet that the rental agencies are starting to experiment with renewalable/non-petroleum fuel sources.
And in case you [...]
So, as I’m travelling quite a bit now, I’ve decided to sign up for all of the hotel, air, and rental car frequent traveller programs I can. Most of the sign-up experiences have been nothing too spectacular, but I’d like to draw particular attention to Alamo and their Quicksilver program for particular scorn.
First off, go [...]