Remember the Alamo, or Boycotts - Part I

Over the course of the past few years I’ve decide to boycott a number of different establishments, Alamo Rental Car among them. Here’s why:

Mere months before Mary became Mrs. Bitter, her mother was rushed to the hospital gasping for air. Decades of smoking had sentenced her to breathing through an oxygen mask, and ultimately not even that was enough. Her condition was stabilized, but her prognosis was grim. The decision was made to call her children down to Florida for what would be the last time they would see her alive.

We flew into Orlando Airport, where we had reserved a car with Alamo through travelocity. A shuttle bus dropped us off at a nondescript building with a sprawling counter, behind which a number of workers chatted and joked and basically ignored us. It was late at night, and we were both tired and somewhat overwrought by our circumstances, but I don’t believe I’m exaggerating when I say that it took fifteen or twenty minutes for someone to acknowlege our existence. A young woman smiled and greeted us with synthetic politeness. When I noted that we had been waiting for a long time, all pretense of pleasantry vanished. She printed out our contract with robotic efficiency, after which we left the building to find our car in the parking lot.

Much to our surprise, it was not a generic white subcompact, but a spiffy, metallic silver SUV. We drove up to the gate to check out, feeling as if there was a silver lining to our otherwise cloudy experience. No dice. The guard at the gate noted that our contract called for a compact car and more or less implied that we were stealing the SUV. I explained that I was directed to the very spot where the SUV was parked, pointing to a pair of numbers written in permanent black ink on the back of the Alamo envelope. He called for the clerk, who evidently had to interrupt yet another scintillating conversation with her co-workers to come out to the parking lot and rectify the situation.

The clerk explained that she had written down the wrong number, and that we would need to take a compact car. I countered that I truly believed that she had given us an upgrade in order to compensate us for having waited so long. I’ll never forget the contemptuous glare she shot at me in response. No apologies, no concessions, no effort to appease an angry but reasonable customer—just venom. And that’s why I’ll never rent a car from Alamo again.

By way of epilogue, I followed up this experience with an email to Alamo, detailing inexcusably poor service and rude employees. I immediately received an automated reply from their Customer Service Department, and then nothing else.

Next in this series: Hampton Inn.