[TiredIntern]

I remember working at a city branch and loathing the people at NatRes. I would have customers call me at my branch (only one open other than the airport and of course they were sold out) telling me they just booked on the phone and were told I would deliver to him and give him a Malibu. I'd be by myself and the only midsize I would have would be in the shop. That would drive me nuts. I would always tell my irrate customer, "the people from our 800 number cannot see what kinds of vehicles we have nor can they see how many we have, plus, they are from the states and we have different policies here than they have in America."

Now I work at an airport location, NatRes is a huge help. The only silly thing I see now is being asked to pre-write a ticket and not having any information to do so. More often than not those people are 5 hours late anyway. Other than that they are a phone call away and always willing to help. They call us with the customer if they have any questions that only we can answer and they do not guarantee anything to the customer without going through us first. It's a wonderful tool, if only all branches were able to utilize it.

What I do not understand about this company is how can they run some (let me stress some) airport locations so efficiently and let the rest of the city suffer?! We fill up all of our tanks, are always able to have a vehicle for someone (85% of the time we do not have to give the infamous "free upgrade"), get great rate, no walk-arounds, no washing cars in our suits, 40 hours a week max., no cash quals, and still sell out every week, our vehicles are always clean, and we actually have some control of how our branch is run.

It's odd that although the replacement market is where we get the majority of our customers and we've been doing it for almost 50 years now we still make the same mistakes.