Europcar Sydney Airport

Copy of my email to Europcar on Wednesday 9th November 2011.... Still no reply from Europcar.

Dear Sir/Madam,

I would like to express my disappointment in the service I received from your staff at the service desk in the Sydney International Airport today. I arrived off my flight from LAX and arrived at the Euporcar desk at approximately 9:30am to collect my pre booked car, booked for pick up at 9am, and lined up with about eight other customers in the line in front. There was one Europcar staff member serving at the desk at this time. At 10:30am the staff member placed the unattended sign on the desk and left citing he had to inspect a returning customers car. This made myself and other customers waiting in the line extremely irate with one customer asking to speak with the manager. The staff member came out with a barrage of abuse, handed a phone to the customer and told them to ring the manager themself. With this the staff member left the desk, heading for the car park.

During this time I rang Europcar’s reservation line to double check my booking and see if I was able to be put through to a manager at Sydney Airport who may have been able to allocate sufficient staff to the International Terminal to help get all us customers on our way. Unfortunately Jarred in the call centre was unable to assist me in matter of contacting a manager but he did confirm my booking. The staff member returned to the desk about 15 minutes later and reopened and a second staff member joined the desk at about 11am.

Just after 11am I was finally first in the queue, at which time my business partner joined me at the desk to express our disappointment in the length of time it had taken to get served. The staff member who was serving me was very hostile and threaten to not rent the pre booked car to me because we were complaining about the length of time we had to wait. At this time both my business partner and myself were in shock at rudeness of this staff member. After a 14 hour flight all we were after was the car we pre booked so we could both get home.

We did get our car and were on the road just after 11:30am and the staff member gave us a $40 discount on the rental for the time we had spent in the line. The car we got, a Nissan X-Trail Northern Territory Rego: 995 692 was still dirty, with bugs splattered on the windscreen.

While I appreciate the $40 discount on the rental price I feel it would have been more beneficial to both Europcar and myself to have your staff were instructed to call the manager and ask for addition help if the line is as long as it was today. If there was addition help for this lone staff member at the International Terminal desk then this whole unfortunate event may have been avoided and Euporcar would have had many happy customers today at the Sydney International Airport desk. As it stands my business partner and I will not be using Europcar again and will be letting all of our business associates about the disappointing service we received at the Sydney International Terminal Europcar desk today. (Date of experience: Nov, 2011 )