On the Hertz car rental website, part of their mission statement reads that they “aim to be the most customer focused car rental company in every market (they) serve”.

That must exclude LA airport as this is what happened to us earlier this week.  Keep in mind we’d been travelling for almost 24 hours of elapsed time by this stage, given that it’s impossible these days to fly from the island of Ireland to the US west coast without changing planes somewhere (we’d elected to drive from Northern Ireland to Dublin, fly to London, change onto an American Airlines flight to LA).

First the customer service person tried to sell us LOADS of extras – and I mean LOADS.  She started with a car upgrade (if we’d wanted that we’d have just booked it online in the first place, bizarrely a smaller car than the one we ended up with but at an extra $10 per day) and progressed through a sat nav ending up with pre-paying for petrol.  We kept saying No Thanks but she kept to her script.  I was embarrassed for her & for us as it was excruciating.

Next she claimed that our online car hire (booked via Expedia – she was completely dismissive of them as well!) did not include any insurance.  None at all.  I knew this was not the case so I asked her to print out the contract so as I could read it.  She said she could not do that as our contract was with Expedia and not with Hertz.  This farce continued for about 10 minutes where I kept insisting that the booking I had made included insurance – I wouldn’t have booked it otherwise given it was for the US!  Eventually, she told us she had “found” the insurance clause and she had made a mistake.  She did ask us if we wanted to upgrade the insurance we’d booked however as it was “inadequate”.

The final straw was telling us we’d have to pay for an extra day’s car hire because the time we are due to return the car is an hour later than the time we collected it.  That was because US immigration was unbelievably quick on Wednesday.  You win some you lose some I guess.  She did offer that we could go & hang around in their grotty cafe for an hour if we wanted to collect the car at the time we’d booked it for.  An hour. 

Come on Hertz.  Is this the best you can do.  The last time I used Hertz was September 2001.  I was in the US working at the time & because of 9/11 couldn’t get a flight home & had to stay on for another 2 weeks.  Hertz charged me an extortionate amount of money for the extension & I remember standing in the same office at LAX arguing with another customer service person about whether or not it was their company’s objective to benefit from a national disaster in such an opportunistic manner.

There are plenty of car hire companies about so my advice would be don’t use Hertz.  I certainly won’t be using them again.  I don’t have the strength for the arguments!  On the plus side, the way that experience made me feel also gave me a warm feeling about how we never nickel and dime anyone at Learning Pool – it's a horrible thing to do to customers and it just isn’t worth it in the overall scheme of things.

I know that car hire is something a lot of you will have horror stories about so come on – name & shame.  Send us your experiences in the comments below.  You know we love to read them.

Folks – I’m on holiday so my blogs will be holiday related (probably film reviews – went to see J Edgar last night) for the next few weeks. 

On Thursday evening, I was privileged to join a group of people at the House of Lords to celebrate a significant milestone reached by the Rix Centre.  The Rix Centre, hosted within the University of East London, is a charitable organisation that uses technology to improve the lives of people with learning disabilities.  Last week’s event was to celebrate the Centre achieving 5 years of innovation with its “Living Lab”.  It was both wonderful and humbling to speak with some of the Centre’s Champions who were present on the evening showcasing various video and other multimedia projects they have created.  You can find out more about the work of the Rix Centre here http://www.rixcentre.org/about-us/

I attended the event with Maureen Piggot, Trustee of the Rix Centre and Director of Mencap in Northern Ireland and Ian Graham, Chief Executive of Momentum, the trade association for Northern Ireland’s ICT industry.  All of us have a career long interest in helping people learn so it made for a useful and fascinating evening.

Lord Brian Rix is by far the most sprightly 87 year old I’ve met in a long time.  He and his wife Elspet Gray (I’m ashamed to admit I know her best from the first series of Blackadder, she played the Queen) were delightful hosts and hearing about the various charities they are involved in made me really want to do more both personally and with Learning Pool.  On that note I’ll be contacting Rix Centre Director Andy Minnion next week to see if there’s anything we at Learning Pool can co-produce or help out with at the Centre.  You should too.