A Letter to Budget

I am now thinking about writing Budget a lovely letter expressing my gratitude towards their excellent customer care –

To Whom It May Concern:

On March 16, 2008 I was en route from Bozeman, MT to San Jose, CA. I had elected to rent a car from Budget for my week-long trip in SJC. Seeing as how I travel quite often and spend an average of about $35,000 in travel expenses in a year I am sure that you can appreciate my choosing Budget as one of my preferred car rental vendors.

I’d like to take this opportunity to applaud Budget for being a progressive company. I work in the IT industry. Most of us in the industry work outrageously long and strange hours, as well as being on call, in order to keep the computer and network systems up and running. It’s nice to know that Budget bucks this trend by placing the happiness and satisfaction of their IT personnel above that of their customers.

I know that in other enterprise network environments that I have worked in we would never be allowed to pull the systems down for maintenance during normal business hours. Imagine my surprise when I called reservations at 3:00pm on a Sunday to find out that Budget was taking that extra step so that the IT folks wouldn’t have to do maintenance in the middle of the night.

Never mind the fact that I, as the customer, was about to be stranded at an airport. Never mind that I had a reservation with Budget. Never mind that it was still the middle of the day on a very heavily traveled day. Budget decided that its customers were not that important and took down the systems for maintenance.

And as luck would have it, I ended up not getting stranded at the first airport. Fortunately, due to severe turbulence and many flight delays I was now in another city (SFO) and not where I was to pick up my rental car (SJC). I really enjoy it when this happens, especially because it allows me another fine opportunity to interface directly with the folks at Budget that tell me that they can’t help me out. Yes, I realize it isn’t Budget’s fault that the plane almost fell out of the sky after sever turbulence and that we were forced to route to another airport. But I also realize that Budget has no compassion for its customers by refusing to alter an existing reservation to alleviate me having a particularly bad travel day. After speaking to a representative and then a supervisor and even asking for special dispensation due to my ordeal I was flat out told that it wasn’t possible to waive a one-way pick-up fee even though some of the other car rental companies in the Bay Area don’t even charge this fee to their customers.

Yes, I guess that means that Budget is a fine all-around company to its employees even at the expense of its customers. I had plenty of time to think what that must be like to work for a company like this while I spent the next two and a half hours taking the charter bus to SJC so I could pick up my car and drop it off at the same airport. That being said, I’d like to send you my resume for review. At least I wouldn’t be having to work odd hours and travel all over the country, and I wouldn’t be getting screwed by other car rental companies.

If you don’t like my resume, please feel free to shove it up your ass along with a set of car keys.