Having reservations about Europe.

I had a “Seinfeld moment” while vacationing in Europe a month ago and, despite being rather annoyed at the time, I had to laugh at the utter ridiculousness of the situation. It goes like this: A friend and I were visiting another friend in Germany and had made numerous plans in advance, one of them being securing a rental car for a road trip down to Florence, up to Munich for Oktoberfest, and then back to Wurzburg. Now many of you may be aware that driving an automatic car in Europe is not so much the norm — manual transmission is by far more common. So knowing this, and knowing all three of us were not confident in our stick shift skills, we knew we needed to find a rental car service that offered an automatic car. We eventually found a place, and our friend in Germany went in person to reserve the car about a month and a half prior to our visit. Great. Perfect. Can’t wait.

After much anticipation we arrive in Germany, and are soon on our way to pick up our lovely little automatic car. We present our confirmation and immediately it’s trouble. “Hmm, an automatic car? We don’t have that here, sorry.” This was around the time I found out reservations apparently mean squat at this establishment. Excuse me, what? “I can check but I don’t think we have one on these premises.” What? This piece of paper says you will have one here for us today. We are paying you money so that an automatic car will be here today. “We could upgrade you to a Mercedes C-Class automatic, but since you’re driving to Italy we can’t permit it.” Say what? “But we can rent you a car with manual transmission.” Right, but we reserved an automatic car for a reason. We can’t drive stick. (Now, I’d like to point out that if an emergency was to develop in my presence, and the only conceivable way to extinguish said emergency was for me to drive a stick-shift car from Point A to Point B, I could do it, OK?) But since this was clearly not the case, I was not about to test my abilities on the Autobahn where there is virtually no speed limit and driving 90 mph through the mountains is considered slow. Call me crazy. My friends felt the same, and so the only solution (if you can even call it that) was to rent the automatic car … that we reserved … over a month ago.

Judging from her body language, it was no secret that we were quickly becoming a complete pain in the neck for our rental agent. This progressed into a lot of hemming and hawing, frantic typing and many loud sighs of frustration on her part. Let me just remind everyone again that my friends and I did not roll in off the street and demand that an automatic car be available that day to rent. We reserved the car! And it was at this moment that I found myself reciting the words of Jerry Seinfeld in my head:

Agent: I'm sorry, we have no mid-size available at the moment.



Jerry: I don't understand. I made a reservation; do you have my reservation?



Agent: Yes, we do, unfortunately we ran out of cars.



Jerry: But the reservation keeps the car here. That's why you have the
 reservation.



Agent: I know why we have reservations.



Jerry: I don't think you do. If you did, I'd have a car. See, you know how to 
take the reservation, you just don't know how to hold the reservation, and 
that's really the most important part of the reservation, the holding. Anybody
 can just take them.

After several minutes she finally locates two automatic cars. One is smaller, but has GPS. The other is larger, but lacks a navigational system. Since my friends and I assume we’re bound to get lost (which we most certainly did, but that’s another story), we opt for the smaller, GPS-equipped vehicle. She tells us someone has to drive it down from up north and it should be here in about two hours. Ugh. Fine. Fantastic. A couple hours, later we return to the rental agency only to find that they have driven down the larger, GPS-less car, AKA the one we so did not request. This place is bananas. Whatever, we’ll take it. Just get us out of here!

I’ve worked in customer service before and, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from it (no, not that one about the customer always being right because everyone can be wrong sometimes), it’s that you should never, under any circumstances, express disdain to the client for having to fulfill the duties of your job. I guess this will just go down as another demonstration of the disconnect that can exist between the customer service expected and the customer service provided.

In the end, there was one good thing that came of our encounter with this particular business — with absolutely no explanation given (of course), the cost of renting the car was about 150 euros less than we were originally quoted. If the price adjustment had anything to do with what we went through to get the car, we’ll never know. But whatever, we’ll take it. — Julie, Traffic Coordinator