Dear Flightcar,
I tried. I really tried. When I found out about you, I was stoked. "Finally!" I thought, "A company that's going to disrupt the miserable car rental business!" And in theory, the concept is great. The only problem: The car rental business is a customer service-intense industry. Translation: your customer support has to be on point.
Unfortunately, the customer support department at Flightcar seems to be largely non-existent. (Quite frankly, this is the last thing I expected from a well-funded Silicon Valley startup with top tier investors.) But before I detail my laundry list of personal experiences (including the phone call that put me over the edge), let's check some recent tweets.
Extremely poor service by @FlightCar, if you are keeping my car at least reply to my email! Customer service doesn't end after you take it.
— Manveer Chawla (@manveerc) August 8, 2015
@rujulz @FlightCar is an awesome concept -- but as an owerner/renter you guys REALLY need to step your customer service game. Its terrible.
— Steven Edouard (@sedouard) July 21, 2015
Thanks @FlightCar for being completely useless. Being given the excuse "growing pains" with complete failure to provide a service won't do.
— MOM (@momjohnberg) August 7, 2015
Support interactions with @FlightCar and @MoveLoot today have been disappointing - hard to love the product when the human element is broken
— Andrew Jiang (@andrewjiang) July 6, 2015
@FlightCar sent the email to you as requested on Monday. Still no response. What's up?
— Zach Leiwant (@ZachLeiwant) July 19, 2015
@FlightCar I left my car with you over a month ago & it had 3 trips. I have yet to receive anything from you guys. Is that typical?
— Brittany Cameron (@mbabritt) July 16, 2015
@FlightCar I'd liked to get picked up and taken to my car. No 1 is answering your toll free number or txts. Waiting for over 30 minutes now
— Jason A. Staats (@Jason_Staats) August 10, 2015
Notice the timestamps on these tweets. These are all from just the past few weeks.
The quote from @andrewjiang is spot on: "The human element is broken."
I can safely say the encounters I've had with the people at Flightcar (non-sales related) have been some of the worst experiences I've ever had with support teams. We're talking along the lines of AT&T, Verizon, and dare I say Comcast?
Flightcar, you have to fix this if this business is going to continue.
The encounter I had tonight is just icing on the cake, but before I get there, let's just review some former personal experiences with Flightcar that come to the top of my head. (These are largely the same as many other complains that can be found online. Just read some Yelp reviews or do a search for @flightcar on Twitter.)
Summary of previous issues
- The first time my wife and I rented through Flightcar, we waited for our airport pickup for 45 minutes before giving up and Ubering ourselves to the Seattle station.
- We ordered a 2009-2015 luxury sedan and were given a 2004 Audi A6. (Build-in navigation - what I was hoping for? Fat chance.) I returned the vehicle the next day. Getting our refund took 7 emails over 8 days.
- Deciding to give Flightcar the benefits of the doubt, we entered one of our vehicles in the monthly rental program. We were told the max monthly mileage put on the vehicle would be 1,800 miles. Our Jeep was pummeled with over 2,300 miles in less than a month, so we pulled it out.
- Within that time period, email notifications stopped working for a portion of it and we received no updates about when our Jeep was returned or rented, and no notice from Flightcar about the issue.
- There were multiple encounters of waiting a week for a response to emails, and on several occasions, no responses at all. On at least two occasions, I was told my emails went into the spam folder. (Seriously? The Zendesk spam folder??)
But the latest issue in my series of terrible interactions, and quite frankly, my breaking point, involves a support call about missing floor mats from the Jeep we loaned to the monthly program. Getting no response in over 3 days, tonight I decided to call.
- I called the Flightcar support line, explained the missing floor mats, and asked to be transferred to the Seattle office so I could find out if anyone could locate them.
- The woman on the phone, bless her heart, believing my name to be Clory, couldn't find my account. (Really? Clory?? And yes, I clarified several times but it just wasn't processing.) After the battle to get that figured out (Cory with an i like igloo or y like yo-yo?), she asked if I could describe what a floor mat is. Let me repeat, and I quote: "Can you explain more what is a floor mat?" Ma'am, I think you might be in the wrong business.
- BUT, it gets better. After getting transferred to the Seattle office, I can overhear the male representative talking to someone (possibly the woman from the call center), but he didn't know I could hear him. Some of the phrases I overheard included: "I've seen some floor mats but I don't touch them." "Yeah that's a lost and found thing." "This is the second person who's asked about floor mats."
- After several minutes of me listening in and waiting for him to address me, the call was disconnected. Not dropped. Disconnected.
At this point, I decided to record the call when I called back. The recordings aren't nearly as money as the first call, but you'll get the gist.
I believe the woman at the call center is the same woman I had previously talked to, though having talked to me literally 10 minutes before, it didn't ring a bell for her. And this time, she thought my name was Troy.
Once transferred to Seattle, I was again able to hear the other end of the call. He didn't say anything this time, though. And so finally, a few minutes in when I realized the rep had no intention of introducing himself to me, I decided to speak up. Sure enough, he could hear me and responded. Although, seriously, those phone skills... :-/
Toward the end of the call, we got disconnected AGAIN. Hoping to give him my phone number so he could have someone call me back in the morning, I called the support center a third time. Except this time, the call center was closed for the night.
Great. Still no resolution to my missing floormats.
I had intended to try to loan Flightcar another vehicle, but seriously Flightcar, enough is enough. I'm done, and I hope you can clear up these amateur mistakes up very soon. You've lost my business for good, and from what I'm seeing on social sites, I'm not the only one.
Thanks for listening and I wish you the best.
Cory