Avoid: Ace Rent-a-Car

As lightly described in this post, I recently rented from Ace Rent A Car in Los Angeles over Labor Day weekend.  It wasn’t what I would call a great experience.

When I looked for rental cars on Kayak, Ace came up as cheapest, by a factor of almost 1/2.  Their cheapest rental was a smart car at about $12 a day, with tax and fees, about $50 for the Friday–Monday rental.  I typically rent from Alamo, but since I needed the car just for in-city driving — you can’t get anywhere in Los Angeles without a vehicle, and cabs can be way too costly as I found on my last trip, two years ago — so I gave them a try.

Ace is located off-airport, at the nearby Sheraton.  These days, you have to catch a shuttle from most any airport to the car lots, so that was no big deal.

At the rental desk, they had terminals for up to three agents working.  One customer was being served, and one return was being processed.  A third agent came up and helped the one person in line in front of me.  When the return was done, that agent left for the back room.  (On break?  I don’t know.)  The first rental was having issues of some sort.  When the second rental was done, that agent also left.  Once they finally helped me, it had been 45 minutes from when I arrived at the rental desk (an hour from when I caught the shuttle) until they got me the car, with only one person in line in front of me.  Fortunately I had no particular place I needed to be until that evening, so the delay was mostly annoyance, but it would have been bigger had this been a trip where I had a meeting to get to or where I was flying into Los Angeles and driving to Palm Springs.

(In comparison, at Alamo I would have walked to a kiosk — which probably wouldn’t have had anyone in line at it, since most people don’t seem to know to use them — and since I’m a Quicksilver member, I would have spent about 3 minutes at the kiosk, walked out to the parking lot, grabbed my car, and been gone in total time of less than 10 minutes, max.)

I had to fill out more than one form, including manually transcribing my insurance number twice.  They required a $250 deposit to do the rental, so I had to put it on my debit card rather than the credit card I wanted to use.  (This was indicated in the details on their web site, so I was fine with it.)

(In comparison, just a couple initials — checkboxes on the kiosk UI — at Alamo, and I could have paid with the debit card in advance, with no deposit.  In positive comparison, though, I refuse to rent from Thrifty because of their forms: the last time I rented from them [about a decade ago, so it may have changed], their agents had to verbally read you the entire text rather than letting you read it, making the rental process about 5 times as long as it needs to be.)

Because it was a holiday weekend, I didn’t get the car I had reserved, but I ended up with a larger one at the same price.  (That’s fairly standard.  I once ended up with a huge Lincoln or some such huge beast at compact price point because they oversold all their lower classes of car.)  The car was not well cleaned inside, including what looked like shoe marks on the passenger seat.  I got the impression that, as a second or third tier company, Ace probably gets last year’s models from the first tier companies and then doesn’t put much into maintenance and cleaning.  Or else people who rent from them don’t take care of the rentals very well.  (Or I could have just got an undertended one due to the weekend’s pressure to turn things through quickly, an exception.)

The car worked fine for the weekend.

When I returned it on Monday, I fortunately didn’t have to wait 45 minutes to be served.  But during the check-in, the agent sat behind his terminal and clicked this, paused, clicked that, paused, click the other, paused.  After what felt like 15 minutes of whatever he was doing (was probably only 5), he told me that his computer had frozen, but my deposit would be refunded.

(The mainline rental companies check you in when you drive up.  They check the gas and mileage and look for any damage, give you a receipt, and you’re done.  I have no idea what all he was entering, why he was so slow, or how long he was trying to do something with the frozen computer, nor why he didn’t ask anyone for help.  Implication: this isn’t a quick process for them and the freezes happen often enough to not be remarkable.)

After returning home, I monitored my checking account to see when the deposit would free up.  Usually the rental and deposit will be issued separately, with the deposit being an account hold which will free in a maximum of 72 hours because it wasn’t actually charged.  Since I brought the car back fine, the rental charge would go through and the hold would be allowed to expire.  Not with Ace: on Wednesday morning, the entire $300 had been deducted from my account!  I called them up and they said this was standard practice and the deposit would be refunded.  On Friday, it still had not, and a call said 3 to 7 business days (and thus maybe not until the next Wednesday); at this point, I had my suspicions that I might have to fight them over things.  Fortunately, end of day Tuesday (6 business days out), the $300 was refunded to my account.

Notice what didn’t happen: because the two charges were lumped together, by refunding it, they didn’t actually charge me for the rental at all.  So I lost access to $250 for a week, but ended up technically ahead of the game.  (But with a bad taste for the company in the process.)

So, in summary:

• Very slow check-out service
• Dirty car
• Slow and uncommunicative check-in service
• Deposit not done as an account hold and only refunded over a week later
• Ultimately, they couldn’t even process the rental fee correctly and lost their money

Conclusion: a company that doesn’t deserve the business.  I would have spent $100 on renting from Alamo rather than (expecting to spend) $50 at Ace, but I would have had a much better experience.  If I had been under any sort of deadline or distance pressure for the weekend, the $50 difference would have been totally worth it.  Lesson learned.

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Updated on October 14, 2010

Turns out that the rental fee did eventually show up, charged to the original credit card I had made the reservation with.  The computer freeze had blocked me from getting a close-out receipt, so I couldn’t know that at the time.

Following my rental, they sent me an online customer service survey request, and I took the opportunity to rate them pretty poorly.  (I refrained from outright cussing the out.)  A couple days ago, I got a letter thanking me for taking the survey and expressing that they were sorry that I didn’t have a good rental experience.  They also included one of those ubiquitous grocery tote bags.  Wonder if I can turn it inside out so their logo doesn’t show?

Avoid: Pagoo.com

Pagoo.com is one of the new companies running an Internet answering machine service.

It’s a great idea.  What happens is that they set up a voicemail box for you.  You then contact your telephone company (or they can do it for you), and set the Busy Call Forwarding to go to that voicemail box.  Then if someone calls while you are online, instead of getting a busy signal for hours at a shot, they get redirected to where you’ve left a message — “Hi, this is Jim.  I’m probably online right now, but leave a message and I’ll get it over the Internet!”  You then get notified of the message they left and can listen to it right there, without dropping your connection, and then act on it or not.

As I said, great idea.  (Unless, of course, you’re not online, but are talking on the phone instead.  Then they leave a message and you don’t get it until the next time you connect.  If you’re online frequently, that won’t be a problem.)

When Pagoo first started, they were a Windows-only product.  (No surprise there, these days.)  But they intended to add a Macintosh version.  I asked to be notified of such, and was invited to take part in the beta program for Mac Pagoo 1.1.

As part of the signup for Pagoo (at the time; details may have changed since then), they will set up the voicemail box for you for a 30-day free trial (after which it is $3.95 per month), and they will spring for the fees for setting up the Busy Call Forwarding switch and your first month’s fee for that service.  (Very cool.  Assuming you stick around, they’ll get that cost back in a couple months.)

This was all fine, until the beta period extended beyond the end of the 30-day free trial.  Presto!  My voicemail greeting was replaced by “This user’s 30-day free trial has expired.”  (No indication that they had got the right phone number, nor why [or that] they had been transferred to what had been a voicemail box.)  As a result, my use of the Pagoo system and participation in the beta program was instantly over (if no one could leave a message, that kind of reduces the feedback I can give, no?).  The fact that some outside modem had called up my phone and locked up my line into always-busy (and scrambled my answering machine, too) while I was away for a four-day weekend only made things worse, as I couldn’t retrieve my own messages, only get that damned message.)

So I tried to contact the company.  I started with my e-mail contact person, Philippe Piernot (vice-president of Product Development at the time), asking for an extension of my “trial period” through the end of the beta program.  (After all, there was nothing for me to buy yet, since the Macintosh version wasn’t publicly available.  I don’t pay to take part in beta programs.  [Mmm, but that OS X public beta is awfully tempting!])   No response from him.  So I go to the company’s web site, looking for customer support information.  I found a FAQ document, but what didn’t I find?  Any telephone number or even an e-mail address for customer support, that's what.   (What great customer support!)  I eventually sent an e-mail to their “Suggestion Box” address, indicating a deadline: in two days, they needed to resolve the matter and contact me (I gave my work number), or I would cancel the service and not be able to recommend it to anyone else.

I ended up giving them three days, and you can tell from this essay what they failed to do.

In conclusion, the idea is great: voicemail for while you are online, which you can retrieve without losing your connection.  Only about $7.00 per month, far less than the cost of a second phone line.  There are apparently several companies offering variations on this idea.  Check one of them out, though, because Pagoo is one to not deal with.

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Nine days after the deadline elapsed, I got an e-mail from the company, saying “Of course we’ll extend your trial period!”  Too little, too late.  The Busy Call Forwarding had already been shut off, and the software deleted; three-plus weeks of the service being inactive and thus giving people a negative impression of me is three-plus weeks too many.

I’ve requested that the company remove all contact information about me from their files (twice: in my “I’m gone” message and in my response to this one).  Any further contacts by the company are going to be turned over to the Better Business Bureau, and then treated as harassment.  (A year later, no such contacts have come.  I guess the threat did its job.)

(I really, really don’t like service companies who don’t serve.)

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Updated on October 11, 2000

In the year since I originally wrote this, search engines have picked up this page, and hardly a week goes by that I don’t get an e-mail from someone thanking me for warning them off from a potentially bad company.  In one case, I got an e-mail from someone else who had had a bad experience with Pagoo, possibly even beating out my own, where they completely screwed up his phone service.

And a year later, there is still no e-mail contact method on their web site for dealing with customer issues and complaints other than “Suggestion Box.”

Updated on July 19, 2007

In the process of posting this on the new blog, I thought I would go check out the current state of Pagoo, since I still get one or two notes a year from this piece on the old website.  Pagoo is still around, and sure enough, still with no contact info for the company on the website.   Can’t even tell what country it is based in.

Avoid, avoid, avoid.

Updated on December 11, 2009

Still no contact info for the company on their website<. I notice that the Mac version only runs in Classic, so no new Mac from the last several years can use the service, which indicates that they probably have very few Mac customers. Of course, this is also a service that is increasingly of little use: broadband, WiFi, and cell phones greatly reduce the need for the service. I still get e-mail comments on this blog post every few months, despite the blog now having moved twice!