Email I sent BRC-
This has been one of the worst travel experiences of my life. To make matters worse, this happened during our honeymoon and too often took the focus off celebrating our relationship. In the hope your company attempts to make this right, the following is a recount of all our issues we had with your vehicles since we stepped foot in New Zealand.
We returned the first car after the first night solely because we didn’t feel safe driving it to our hotel from the airport. It smelled. The windshield was smeared and affected the visibility especially during the rain. I couldn’t read the instrument panel because of moisture that had fogged up inside the panel. This also led to your staff not noticing the gas tank wasn’t full as I had to put in $35 worth of gas when I returned it after my one trip to our hotel and back.
After we arrived at our hotel, we coordinated switching out the car via email with the support staff. They seemed helpful as they gave us a make and model to switch out the next day. Unfortunately, they didn’t communicate that with the branch and it took 2 hours on site to get a new vehicle.
The second vehicle we received was better but not by much. It also had limited visibility of the instrument panel but we took it to get our trip under way. During the course of the trip we discovered that the A/C unit only worked periodically. The brakes need servicing and make a god awful, embarrassing shriek throughout the journey. Never failed to make the noise when pulling up to a hotel valet as we caught the attention of everybody in ear shot. It was quite embarrassing. Finally, the car didn’t start one morning. We called the AA number and the technician came out and discovered our key fob battery had died. He didn’t have a replacement so he rigged two batteries together that could barely get the car started. I ended up having to purchase the correct battery later on because we were so worried the car was going to leave us stranded.
I returned the car a day early because I was concerned something else might happen that would cause us to miss our flight on the way home. It was really that bad.
Also, the stress of driving an unreliable vehicle really took a toll on my wife. The anxiety definitely rolled over into the “fun” parts of our trip and negatively impacted our experience as a whole.
In total, we missed out on a day and a half of our honeymoon dealing with issues with your vehicle and spent an extra $200 in keeping the dang thing operational. The embarrassment of driving that vehicle through town and the anxiety it caused negatively impacted our entire trip. At an absolute minimum, we are requesting:
refund of a days charge since we returned it early
Credit for the AA technician service since the issue was in no way our fault. ($165)
Credit for the battery I had to buy and install in the key fob. ($9.99)
Again that is an absolute minimum that we expect to receive. I personally think we should have all of our money returned for putting us in a dangerous, unreliable vehicle, negatively impacting our occasion we chose to trust BRC with, and to show that you do care about the viewpoint of a customer. We intend to write a full review when we get home to save other travelers from our experience. The efforts you take to mitigate our issues will be accounted for in our review.
__________________________________________________
After a month of seldom answered emails back and forth, they refunded me about $150 US. Horrendous customer service, poor quality of vehicles, and complete overall dissatisfaction with the company. Only positive I can say is they had availability where others did not. Be careful!
