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We are doing something that no other company like ours is doing not only are we telling you everything up front we are now going to show you what can go wrong and some of the complaints we get Obviously things can and do go wrong but 99% of the time its NOT our fault we have spent a lot of time and research making our website and booking system as foolproof as possible In fact we quite often get people telling us we give too much information out. Well we only do this because experience has taught to do this and realistically over 99% of the complaints we get can be resolved long before they ever happen just by a Little forethought on the part of the customer. The UK is a Lot smaller than the USA the roads here are a lot smaller the cars here are a lot smaller in fact everything is a lot smaller. We don't as a rule allow S.U.V's On British roads as they are too large and with our gas prices at roughly U$6/Gallon (yes thats correct SIX DOLLARS a gallon for gas) the car engine sizes are a lot smaller and so are the vehicles what you would call a compact car in the states is a STANDARD CAR here. The actual costs of vehicles here a lot higher as well we pay roughly 160% more than the USA for Cars here therefore some of the items you are used to in the states as standard are considered LUXURY items here and because it costs more to buy a vehicle here a lot of these items are left out to make vehicles more affordable Here is a List of items that Do NOT usually come as standard in UK cars
I could go on forever but i wont these are just some of things that you might be used to in the states but you wont get here. Sure many of our vehicles has some/all of the above but unless you request them it will be "pot-Luck" if your vehicle has any/all of the above. Another of the complaints we get is that it takes us a Long time to get in from the airports to the hotels well there are two factors you have to take into account here 1: NONE of London's airport are actually in what YOU think of as London Heathrow is the nearest and thats technically NOT in London (it straddles the border)
As a city geographically London is as Large as Mexico City the whole of New York and New Jersey combined you could fit most of the cities in the USA inside London 3 to 4 times and still have room to spare
There are 8 Million People that live in London and during the weekdays there are 14 Million people in the city thats a lot of people in fact London has more people living in it than 43 states of the United States there are more people in London than the entire population of Norway and sweden combined in fact there are more people in London during a weekday than there are people in the entire continent of Australia
2: HISTORY... London was not built overnight many cities in the USA were built after vehicles of some sort were around
so the city planners allowed for and Planned for vehicular access we don't have the long straight wide roads you have we don't have a grid system in London. Now we come to the biggest complaint of them all OVERCROWDING!. What can I say? how many warnings do we give on our website? in fact you cannot get to the booking or quote forms without seeing a "pop-up" Window WARNING about luggage space and car sizes when you request a quote you also along with the response get a warning about luggage space when we confirm a booking we give warnings about luggage space and vehicle size. Sometimes i sit here and wonder what people expect from us we are not mind readers we don't know what you really want we can only give you what you ask for we can try and help and advise you but in the end when it all comes down it We HAVE to assume that you have read the website before you book the car and that you have some idea of how much luggage you are bringing with you. Yet on average we get 20/30 quote requests per day asking how much a car for 4 people and luggage for 2 weeks is??? Go figure???. Yet even more amazing is the fact on our quote request forms the "car" option is NOT the default one same as our booking forms you have to look at other options BEFORE selecting this one (this is done to make sure we are happy YOU have read everything and understand it.) When we send back a quote response and we feel that someone has underestimated the type/size of vehicle we send back a little note stating this and quoting for what we feel is the better option GUESS WHAT????? Yup you are getting it people don't appear to read this and then attempt to book the WRONG type of vehicle We can only supply what you ask for. Here is an Extract from a recent complaint we got here. We ordered an estate wagon for 4 persons plus 8 pieces of luggage. We got a small station wagon that barely held four persons and our six pieces of luggage. We were cramped in the back seat and its a long way from Dover to Gatwick At first glance this seems like a valid complaint however now see it from our point of view the person concerned in this complaint originally requested a quote from us for a CAR from Dover to Gatwick we replied to this sending back as requested a quote for a car as well as a Note stating that we felt the Station-Wagon Option would be a better one for them. Two days later we got a booking form in from this person Booking an ordinary car we accepted the booking and again sent them a note stating that a larger vehicle would better suit their needs we had no reply to this so we HAD to assume they had read the website and had seen the warnings and knew what they were doing. We collected them from Dover at the appointed time and date and as luck we have it we sent a Nissan Primera Estate car (remember this party only booked and paid for a standard car) the Nissan primera is one of the largest Station-Wagon vehicles in the UK Station-Wagons really don't come any bigger than that here. When I saw the comment about cramped i immediately called the driver into the office to explain as to why he had put 4 people onto a rear seat designed for only three (my assumption from the tone of the complaint) to my amazement he told me he didn't 3 people sat in the rear one in the front next to the driver. He also pointed out that in his estimation there wasn't a single person that weighed under 200lb in that party. Yes UK cars really are that small 3 LARGE people in the back of ANY UK car are going to feel cramped. He then told me that these people actually only had 6 suitcases as stated but they also had 5 pieces of carry-on luggage and 8 carrier bags full of souvenirs. These suitcases were so big and heavy the driver had to get help to get each one off of the ground. I responded to the complaint pointing out what the website says about luggage what the quote and booking forms say about luggage and what the confirmation we sent said about luggage. These people are still convinced it was all our fault but if you are reading this i think you may feel differently. Although I run things around here I don't sit at a computer all day I actually go out and do transfers as well I don't need to But i do for several reasons. Over the years experience has taught us what goes wrong and we are continually striving to make things easier and better and less likely to cause friction of any sort. Here's another type of complaint "your driver wasn't at the airport i had to catch a cab to my hotel and it cost me three times more than your service would have done" again at first glance it seems a valid complaint but now lets delve into this one a bit more. Out of the eleven complaints we had about us not being there on further investigation we were there 10 out the 11 times we received a complaint and in 9 cases for some reason or another the customer didn't call our number In one case the customer did call our number but from the WRONG airport he told us Heathrow and he was at Gatwick. In the one case we were not there it was because the customer booked the car for the 13th we turned up on the 13th and the customer wasn't there on the 14th at the same time we got a call from the customer asking where his driver was we pointed out his driver was their exactly as booked by himself but todays date was the 14th we had been given the departure date (the uK is 9 hours ahead of most of the states that means you arrive here the day AFTER you depart). Over 95% of the flights that come in from the states are daily flights that means they come in at the same time everyday 7 days a week with the same flight number for instance Delta airlines flight 10 Comes into Gatwick everyday at 08:00AM if you tell us DL10 and give us a date we have to assume that you have given us the correct date because that flight comes into the airport daily Heres another thing London as Stated above is NOT the small City people seem to think it is it actually covers 3200 Square miles and has SIX International airports serving it so putting London Airport on a booking/quote form is as useless as an ashtray on a motorbike unless we know WHICH London airport you are refering to we cant guess. Many airports in the states are NOT major International hubs our drivers cannot come right up to your arrivals gate you have to come into the main arrivals hall along with 1000's of other people we don't know what you look like you have to find us. I took a lot of time and effort to photograph the terminals at the airports its available on this website I really don't know how i can make this easier for people but we have to work with what we got we have to follow the rules that are set down for us by law and we have to follow the rules that the airports set for us as well. Its the old story Expectation vs reality we try to tell it how it us other people expect something else for us its a no win situation but things can be made easier if only people took the time and effort to read things we send them I don't write things like this for fun I do it out of exasperation and I do it to make people aware of what can go wrong I keep full stats about this website and for every visitor that reads the main page less than 1% come to this page or our luggage warning page I even know why this is its because we all live in a fast paced sanitised pre-packaged fast-food type of society we expect things to be exactly as we require them and we don't want to know what can go wrong and most importantly of the lot we forget the culture difference the UK and the USA may speak almost the same language but thats where the similarity ends. We rarely ever get what we call a proper complaint would say that less than 0.01% are valid all the rest are covered by the above. There you have it these are some of the things that can go wrong if you are reading this then your transfer wont fall into any above categories because you are a person That believes in the following 6 "P"'s.. Pathetically-Poor-Planning-Prevents-Proper-Performance |