Zipcar Tries to Ruin Christmas

Regular readers of this blog know that I have been using Zipcar since the very early days, over 10 years. I live in Brooklyn and happily do not own a car, in large part due to Zipcar. I’m a happy Zipcar member. Really.

Most of the time it’s easy to reserve a Zipcar, but there are certain days of the year (Memorial Day, 4th of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas) where you have to book well in advance. Our Christmas routine is to open presents at our place and then drive up to my wife’s sister’s place, about an hour and a half away, for dinner. Then we drive back after dinner.

Why such a quick trip? We have a dog Coby who is awesome but has one problem, he gets horribly carsick. I’m sure us not having a car and rarely driving is part of the problem. He’s never gotten used to driving. Yes, there’s doggie medicine for this but he still pukes and is generally miserable. So we just try to avoid driving with him. He’s a mature dog and can handle a long time between walks in a pinch so this means we can just leave him at home. Sure we could put him in a kennel, but we’d have to do it on Christmas Eve and my daughters couldn’t stand waking up on Christmas morning without Coby.

So a month before Christmas I reserve a Zipcar from 8 am to 11 pm on December 25th. All good.

Today my wife decided she wants to stay at her sister’s overnight and she finds a friend who can take Coby around 10 am Christmas morning until the next day. So I go on the Zipcar site to see if we can extend the reservation. The car shows up on the site as “unavailable unavailable” and when I try to modify the reservation I just get errors. That’s obviously not good.

So I call them up. I am informed that my car has been put into a maintenance window and is unavailable. And the only other car at that location is a cargo van. I point out that it’s Christmas Day and are you f*#$ing kidding me? The guy tells me there’s another car only 45 minutes away from our place. A 45 minute drive. At this point I suggest that maybe they not do car maintenance on Christmas Day and just give me the original car. That goes nowhere so I ask for the guy’s manager. He says there’s a long hold for managers. I say I’ll wait. So I do. After 15 minutes or so or bad hold music, there’s a break in the music and I get ready to battle the manager. But the line goes dead. They hung up on me.

I call them back and there must have been visible steam coming out of my ears because my wife tells me not to go crazy on the guy. I calmly tell the new guy that my Christmas Day reservation was messed up and I was hung up on and that I am really upset. I think he got the idea.

Guy #2 was more competent than guy #1. He did a better car search and found something only 15 minutes away. He said Zipcar would pay for an Uber to get there. And he was able to extend the reservation until noon the next day (which as you recall was the original reason I noticed the reservation was messed up). So a bit of a pain to get the car, but we’ll live. Christmas is not ruined.

But seriously Zipcar, somewhere in your algorithm is logic that puts a car into a maintenance window with no regard for existing reservations or critical holidays. In the early years, I’d write that off to growing pains. But you’ve been doing this for a long time. You know the critical holidays. You know you can’t just cancel reservations on those days. If I didn’t try to extend the reservation when would I have discovered this? Christmas morning?

Zipcar needs to figure out a better way to handle this…