- Tom Callow
- Axel E. Catton
- Marco Ferrari
- Martin Hayes
- Cas Heuvelmans
- Amy Miller
- Caroline Holmes
- Belle Moss
- Sarah Morris
- Liam O'Neill
- Andrew Marriott
- Nick Garton
- Katharine Earley
- Professor Emeritus Garel Rhys
- David Rowlands
- Matt Sanger
- Winston Moore
- Dan Sayles
- Ash Sutcliffe
- Judy (Qian) Wang
- Brian Weatherley
- Guest Blogger
- Lizzie Smith
Blog > You can’t please all of the people …
Author: Martin Hayes
I was reading one of the ‘reader’s rants’ features in a national newspapers’ travel sections the other day and was amused to see a complaint about a car hire experience. Now, such a topic is hardly unusual – the ever more arcane practices employed by some car rental companies to extract more cash out of their customers has made them about as popular as the bucket airlines. But this one was different.
The complainant, a retired doctor I think he said, was upset because he had been upgraded to a BMW at his holiday airport! Now, not many people would complain when they are upgraded to anything but losing out on the allocated (I’m guessing) Fiat Panda, VW Polo or Skoda Fabia in favour of one of Germany’s finest must be fairly unusual.
But the good doctor found the BMW 116 he had been given was far too powerful – ‘frightening’, he described it - and gas guzzling compared with what he expected, so much so that he returned it a day early and his beef was that the rental company were refusing to refund that day’s hire charge. Now, even the most ardent BMW fan would surely agree that the 116, apart from being one of the most frugal models in the range, is also one of its most gutless. So one can only assume that this guy’s normal mode of transport is a Reliant Robin or similar.
This really does go to show that you cannot please all of the people all of the time and, most unusually, my sympathies were actually with the hire company.
27th Jul 11
Leave a Comment
Your comments will be moderated before being displayed above. Please note that we will not display your email address, but we might use it to email you back. Links may be included in your comments but HTML is not permitted. Fields marked * are required.