Car-less in Dallas: Dollar turns down one-way rental customer, tells her to go elsewhere

dallasSarah Steffen thought she was making a routine call to Dollar to add a child seat to her confirmed car rental reservation. But the company had some bad news for her: it didn’t have a seat for her — or a car.

In fact, a Dollar representative informed her, she was out of luck if she wanted a car from them. Rent elsewhere.

How could it do that?

Steffen explains what happened to her in an email late yesterday:

Back in April/May 2009, I confirmed a reservation with Dollar rental cars for a one-way rental from Dallas to Oklahoma City, picking up on 9/4/09 and returning on 9/7/09.

I called them today to add a toddler carseat to my rental only to be told that they no longer offer one-way rentals to Oklahoma City. This wouldn’t be an issue, except for the fact that my reservation is for $217 and to make a similar reservation with another company, my rate will skyrocket to close to $500.

This may not have been an issue if they had let me know of this change in advance when I called 6 weeks ago to change my pick-up/drop-off times (due to flight schedule changes), and again last week to confirm my reservation.

I have been through the telephone chain of hell, speaking with reservations, customer service, and their “pre-rental” assistance center with no avail.

Normally, if a car rental company can’t accommodate a customer, it covers the difference to rent a vehicle from a competitor. But first, I wanted to know why Dollar was turning down a confirmed customer.

Here’s what my Dollar contact told me:

There is nothing I can do on this one. Here’s the deal … Just this week, the Oklahoma City location has been converted from a corporate store to a franchised store. One-ways were not a big deal when OKC and Dallas were both corporate-owned. Now that OKC is franchised, it presents problems when they are driving a corporate car and wanting to drop in a franchised city.

Unfortunately, this person is a victim of really bad timing. It’s one of those things that I have no control over.

Dollar said it would send Steffen a few vouchers for a future rental.

Case closed? Not quite.

A few hours later, Dollar contacted Steffen with some good news. She explains:

I spoke with [Dollar representative] Kathleen Hernandez and she offered to pay the difference between the Dollar rate and Hertz’s rate. I am happy with this resolution and am very impressed with her professionalism. She got to the bottom of this issue very quickly.

I’m impressed, too. Dollar did the right thing.

Good thing Steffen phoned Dollar to ask for a child seat, otherwise she would have been in for an unpleasant surprise in Dallas. Dollar should have contacted anyone affected by this refranchising move before their rental date, of course.

Had Steffen found herself car-less in Dallas, she would have had few options for recovering the extra money she had to spend. Fortunately, it didn’t come to that.

(Photo: ragingwire/Flickr Creative Commons)

  • Ames

    I am glad Dollar resolved this, but what a run around for a customer who did everything right, actually confirming the reservation three times. In a case like this where it really does seem to be bad timing of a corporate to franchise mode more than any other factor, why there was no suggestion to change the drop off city. Is there a suburb that is close by where the car could have been dropped off with Dollar providing taxi fare? The resolution offered is better of course, but if one found oneself at the airport and really stuck, this might be an option.

  • Jonathan

    WOW! A travel company who doesn’t hide behind bogus reasons and actually treats the client correctly and does what is right! I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt that this is NOT because Chris (and all his travel media mojo) got involved and that they would have done this anyways. Am going to have to make sure that I check Dollar for rates on future trips!

  • http://www.best-car-rental-tips.com Paula

    Glad to hear that Dollar did the right thing in this situation… but one has to wonder if it’s only Chris’s involvement that prompted such a good outcome. I wonder if they would have been so forthcoming if Steffen had tried on her own to find the same sort of compensation.

    I agree that “Dollar should have contacted anyone affected by this refranchising move before their rental date…”, car rental companies should be more proactive in preventing such customer services issues. I would think that when a Corporate location is changed to a licensee location that there shoud be a condition that any rental booked prior to the change, should be honored as it was confirmed at the time of booking. Wishful thinking?

  • Jasper

    Euhm, hello? Dollar *did not* do the right thing.
    The right thing would have been to honor the confirmed reservation.

    It is not the customer’s problem that they change the inner workings of their company. The right thing for Dollar to do would have been to honor the existing and confirmed reservation, and figure out the problems of their inner reorganization themselves.

    Now, considering that they were unwilling to do that, it was nice of them to make up the difference in cost.

    Seriously folks. Think about yourself, how far you have been neaten to the ground if you consider it “the right thing to do” when a company refuses to honor its own confirmed reservation, leaves a customer out to hang, and then helps out with a little money.

  • Joe Farrell

    Does Dollar have different contract provisions for one – way or RT rentals from corporate or franchisee locations? I don’t see one – and they needed to make the effort to look for these reservations and FIX THEM by giving people fair warning. . . .

  • Kevin M

    Joe F – My guess is that, if one-ways aren’t allowed between a corporate and a franchised location, the computer wouldn’t let you book that kind of reservation kind of like an airline reservation system that only lets you book city pairs when that route can actually be served. This one got through because it was booked before the change in status in OKC.

    At least, I HOPE that their reservation systems are that well-programmed.

  • http://www.bedandbreakfast.com sandy soule

    Part of the problem is that you don’t normally (except on sites like Hotwire) actually pay anything when you reserve a car — we once reserved a rental with Avis in Oaxaca, Mexico during Christmas week. When we got to the rental counter, they were closed, because they (and every other car rental office at the airport) were completely out of cars. I’d rather pay in advance and be guaranteed a vehicle.

  • Chris

    @Jasper: Um, no. Dollar DID do the right thing. Maybe they didn’t handle it properly at first, but what they did in the end would fit any normal person’s standard of satisfaction.

    It’s no different than what an airline does when someone is booked on a flight to a destination that is then canceled. A couple of years ago, UA quit flying to ANC. They rebooked their revenue passengers on AS. That’s exactly what Dollar did: they in effect rebooked their customer with Hertz at no loss to the customer. How is that not the right thing? No reasonable person would expect UA to fly nearly-empty flights to ANC to accommodate the 5 passengers who had booked 300 days in advance before UA closed their operation. Similarly, no reasonable person would expect Dollar to have to pay hundreds of dollars to have the car shipped back to OKC when a perfectly reasonable alternative (rebooking with Hertz) was available. The most the customer was inconvenienced was a few hours running around in phone hell (for which Dollar did offer vouchers as an apology, and yes, it should have been more proactively handled), but the customer was hardly left out to hang.

    @Joe Farrell: one-ways are not allowed between corporate and franchised locations. This is because each franchise owns its own cars independently (unlike Avis “agencies,” which are really just storefronts that get a percentage of revenue from dispatching Avis’s corporate-owned fleet). If a franchisee’s car is dropped off at another location, the franchisee has to pay to get the car back to his location, either by paying to have it shipped (several hundred dollars for even short distances) or paying one of his employees to go retrieve the car (flying down and picking it up or having another employee drive a second employee down to pick it up). It doesn’t matter that it was returned to another Dollar; it’s still his car and his problem. It’s no different than the customer just leaving the car in the middle of nowhere in the Arizona desert. Therefore, one-ways are generally not allowed. (A corporate location can just transfer the car off its books and to the receiving location’s books.)

    @Kevin M: Yes, that is exactly the case. The reservations system will not allow you to book a one-way if it does not qualify. This one slipped through the cracks for the reasons you mention.

    As DTAG proceeds with refranchising some of their corporate locations, they should take note of this issue and make sure to scan through their reservations at affected locations and proactively notify customers of these issues. Of course, many reservations booked via travel agents come through to Dollar’s system without any sort of contact information, which can make it difficult to contact these customers (although perhaps they can contact the travel agencies and relay messages that way).