The Compensation Clinic case this week leans on the Sixt Rent a Car problem at Frankfurt Airport I wrote about earlier this week.
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You can access the original Whine Wednesday topic of this matter here.
This is about the rental of a Jaguar XF at FRA I had 2 weeks ago. I was already surprised when the car in the lot didn’t look like it was promised but I shrugged it off as maybe the agent made a mistake (she did as I was to learn later).
As I was driving off I recognized yet another damage in the windshield that wasn’t visible beforehand so I had to make a U-turn and return to the airport counter. Car returns are handled by ARWE in Germany (just a service company that processes these returns for Sixt and other companies). I asked them to call the Station Manager who eventually showed up and apologized. The ARWE employee wasn’t able to find the car as checked out which should have been an instant red flag. Instead they noted my contract by hand and sent me on the way. I was promised a call back regarding clarification and compensation. This call never came.
I then sent several emails to Sixt Customer Service that wasn’t very fruitful either – eventually I got angry and they told me to just drop the car off at the nearest station or they would come pick it up> I dropped it off full and went home.
The next day I checked the bill that was generated and realized a service fee had been charged for the alternate drop off and I finally had enough. I called Sixt and laid out the case to one of the Customer Service Representatives. She was – if anything – more shocked about the entire case than I was at this point.
To my surprise the agent said right there and then she would waive the entire bill of that weeks rental which came to 214 EUR :
I then received a proper invoice showing a zero balance. I was obviously satisfied with this compensation and as I said I usually rent at Sixt in Germany with 8 out of 10 rentals go without any incident and nice upgrades as Sixt Diamond.
Conclusion
It’s very rare that a phone service agent is empowered to make compensation like this on the spot without having to connect to managers and file a complicated customer service file. The CSR also had live access to the entire email communication to validate my complaint.
I urged them to take this case up with the station manager at Frankfurt Airport to look at exactly what happened here since that’s absolutely not the Standard. I just picked up a new Sixt Card in Hamburg yesterday and the process was smooth, courteous and without any problems.
