Avis Car Rental

I've decided to rent a car for three weeks and made arrangement with Avis of Earl's Court for deliveries on Friday 8th May at 6.30PM.

After rushing back from the office (yup, I have started working), I ended up waiting for 2 hours before it arrived and even that, after numerous calls to them (their call centre). I have to say that I am extremely unhappy with the service of Avis here especially because nobody even tried to call me regarding the delay. Instead, I ended up having to call them (and wait for up to 20 mins on the line trying to get to a person I can speak to) while having 3 hungry kids who are late for dinner. We were planning to drive to dinner you see....

When you call Avis, you get voice that asks you to select one of 5 choices; and what it does not tell you is, you have to then wait for ages to even get to speak to someone. I ended up calling the breakdown line after waiting for more than 20 minutes on the customer service line. The person at the other end of the line was annoyed that I called her for non-breakdown matter. Well, that managed to convince me to show my annoyance as well. Mind you, this was after waiting for more than 20 mins to speak to someone after they've been late by more than an hour in delivering the car. To cut the story short, I quickly get to speak to customer service after that but only to be told that the car was on it's way.

Finally, at 8:30PM, the car arrived. It was a different model than what I was expecting (which is not a problem) with an explanation that the original car broke-down thus the delay and change of car. Huh.....why couldn't a call be made to tell me of the problem and I could have made alternative arrangement for dinner.

All in all, this is one unhappy customer with Avis.