17 ms·

And what is the reason for every agent seemingly needing to rewrite the computer operating system in assembly for each new customer that approaches the kiosk? S

And what is the reason for every agent seemingly needing to rewrite the computer operating system in assembly for each new customer that approaches the kiosk? Seriously why does it take 30+ min to gather someone's basic information, sign a few forms and hand them the keys?

vmarsy 5y ago
It might be network slowness, one day at the rental counter all the paperwork had to be done by hand (and visa contacted by phone to process payment) because their system was down. It took a literal hour. The terminal was unresponsive and displaying the following error: "cannot connect to mainframe" (This was in 2019).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
antsar 5y ago
One guess, from recent experience at Enterprise: so that you're nice and exhausted by the time they quickly flip to the signatures page, which is your first and last chance to catch whatever bullshit fees they tacked on. That was a $100+ lesson, and my credit card sided w/ Enterprise when I tried to dispute (because of course, my signature is right there on the contract).
toddsiegel 5y ago
I feel like this too, but only when other people are at the counter. When I’m at the counter the whole thing never seems to take more than a few minutes. It’s always quick, and smooth, and I’m out of there, seemingly, in no time at all. I desperately want to know what other people are saying or doing at the rental car counter.
- mitigating 5y ago
  They probably didn't rent online
  - ajmurmann 5y ago
    Maybe adding a surcharge for walk-ins or having a separate line for them seems like the way to go. Or maybe don't allow them at all and lay off the staff saved.
- Ontonator 5y ago
  The longer someone is at the counter, the more likely you are to see them. You’re biased towards seeing the relatively few people who take half an hour.
  - ajmurmann 5y ago
    But those are also the people who ruin it for everyone. Why not heavily optimize for the 90% good case via full automation and discourage time intensive behavior. I'm thinking either only taking online reservations or doing a 30% surcharge for walk-ins. The happy case should be that I book online, I get a parking spot location where the car is and a QR code I show on exit. Hertz Gold at SFO is like 80% there, yet the normal case remains having to walk to a desk. It seems in their interest to discourage going to the desk as much as possible.
    - jackson1442 5y ago
      Would be interesting if they offered a subscription service and/or loyalty tier that gives you "real" reservations. Call it "$BRAND Car Guarantee." That way, you know that the customers are committing to actually get their cars, and you can make a term of service that you don't miss N cars per T time (this would be displayed prominently - call it something friendly like "house rules"). Boom, everyone's happy. Your repeat customers are more likely to stay that way, and people will hear about this and _become_ repeat customers because that's what it incentivizes. You can keep prices cheap by overbooking your non-loyalty cars like you already do.
    - llampx 5y ago
      How would they upsell you on insurance and extras if you didn't have any interactions with a sales agent? Honest question.
  - zhte415 5y ago
    I'm reminded of this train/bus is taking ages to come. If one comes, say, every 15 minutes, that's an average waiting time of 7.5 minutes (and there's a +/- of around a minute for whether the 'time' is arrival, doors opening, closing, departure, depending on one's perspective of which 'time' is important to them). If one's already there, or comes within 1-2 minutes, that's perceptively close to time = 0, which pushes out perceived average waiting time to 8-9 minutes with times approaching or exceeding average waiting time having a disproportionately negative perception (your total journey time/connection impact, expectation of unannounced cancellation, etc, increasing). Nifty modern stuff like indicator boards work to re-align these perceptions. Passage of time is also quite non-linear - back to the ATM queue. When using the ATM I'm engaged in a series of short-term tasks, just as writing a comment on HN when sitting on the subway causes stations to pass 'faster'. And back to the ATM - I'm sure there's someone somewhere in a retail banking team that measures average interaction with ATM timings. Do they read HN or would like to comment?
- lowercased 5y ago
  Same thing at drive up ATMs. it feels like people are applying for a mortgage or opening retirement accounts when I'm behind them waiting. And... I know it's an exaggeration, but often I will time the person or people in front of me. Someone taking up to 1 minute - I don't generally mind (unless theres 3 people ahead of me). However, I've often sat behind someone who takes 3-4 minutes, and I can not figure out what the hell they're doing. That said, I think I've only used an ATM 3x in the past year, so this may mostly be a thing of the past now.
  - CydeWeys 5y ago
    I have been, in the past, that annoying person taking up lots of time at the ATM. Here's what I was doing: Depositing lots of checks (up to a dozen at once), with an ATM that in theory supported depositing a whole stack at once but in practice spat them back most of the time if you put in more than one. Oh, and you have to key in the value of each check, and navigate menu options after each individual check deposit. I was very damn efficient considering how much I was doing, but it still took a decent amount of time.
    - dustintrex 5y ago
      As a non-American, the very idea of having to drive somewhere to physically deposit pieces of paper to transfer money around sounds absurd to the point of hilarity.
      - iamtedd 5y ago
        I bought my current car second-hand from a dealer. The best interest rate I could get by far was the line-of-credit loan I already had for my house. I bought the car on my credit card and eventually paid for it with the loan. Automatically done by the bank, of course. Even handling cash feels slightly old-fashioned to me.
        kleiba 5y ago
        I live in a country that still mostly prefers cash to electronic money transfers for many transactions. The individual reasons for that vary but mine is that I want to minimize the ability of third parties to profile me through my purchases (neither stores nor my bank).
- llampx 5y ago
  Seriously, I have seen this phenomenon at government offices as well. Every other appointment seems to take ages, and mine takes a fraction of the time, no matter the outcome.
- e_proxus 5y ago
  The key is preparation. It’s the same for me at hotel check-ins. I’m always prepared, I have all my info available in my mobile or on paper, I’ve already thought about the trip several times before and on the way. Some people seem utterly unprepared. They either don’t have their info at all, or have to login to their web mail, or find some printed paper at the bottom of their enormous suitcase. And then they tend to have tons of questions. I check out the facilities beforehand online so I know what to expect and how to use them.
  - cpcallen 5y ago
    I recently rented a car for the first time, with a co-driver. The rental was paid in advance online (which seemed to be the norm here in the UK) and I thought it was going to be fairly straightforward and quick to collect the car. Instead, after waiting about 15 minutes for the single person ahead of us in line to be processed, we were met with a series of demands for various sorts of verification and documentation that has not been mentioned in the online checkout process. This included having to use a .gov.uk website to get a code that would allow the company to validate our driving licences, and provide a proof of address (despite our addresses being printed on our government-issued, just-verified-authentic driver's licences.) The whole process took nearly half an hour just at the desk. I am glad that there was no one waiting in line behind us most of that time. I've now joined ZipCar and will hopefully never have to deal with a traditional car hire company again.
    - avianlyric 5y ago
      Car rental in the U.K. as a U.K. resident is more complicated than car rental as a non-U.K. resident. Not 100% sure why, but it seems that U.K. residents are required to basically do full IDV (which requires two proofs of address) and prove they have no points in their licence. None of this applies to non-U.K. residents, which probably make up the majority of customers, so the rental website usually put all these details in the fine print. Also while your looking at Zipcar (which is great) also take a peek at Virtuo. Only place I’ve ever enjoyed renting a car from.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- sjg007 5y ago
  There's always someone trying to get a discount or unhappy with their car or something. This is why you join the rewards program, preregister and do the walk out program where everything is all preset and ready to go.
- spurgu 5y ago
  In Europe the companies I've dealt with try to confuse you into buying various insurances, where you were under the impression that you had already paid for it when doing the online booking. Figuring out what the actual situation is takes time. Tip: Do your research and read the fine print online before you leave for your trip.
- bennysomething 5y ago
  Standing at the counter is June at as bad, I'm still wondering wtf the guy is looking at on his screen
hasmanean 5y ago
Hrmpph…obviously they’re not rewriting it in assembly behind the counter—that would be stupid. They’re doing a full build—recompiling it and running basic unit tests on it.
- kubanczyk 5y ago
  > recompiling it and running basic unit tests on it And this is CI/CD done right. As soon as they commit a bug fix, the very next customer can use it.
ajmurmann 5y ago
Why is there even a counter? With Hertz Gold we just get a text message that tells us where the car is. We get in. Papers and key are in there and those get checked for about ten seconds at the exit. That's it. So much more effective for everyone. Budget's equivalent has a weird board that someone needs to update with the info. So much more effective for company and customers. However, for some reason that's the premium experience for which you party the loyalty program. It makes no sense to me that this isn't the heavily encouraged experience. I'd want to make this the only experience so that I have happier customers and can fire large portions of the counter staff. Ideally the paperwork that's in the car right now would be a PDF as well, so that you can lay off the people who do the printing. When I return cars at my local Enterprise it's so absurd. I have to park the car to then go into a little house where I wait in line to talk to a guy in a suit who then runs out to check on the car to then come back in and tell me we are all set. Hertz at SFO had people with iPads where you park the car and you are out in under a minute. Why doesn't Enterprise fire half the guys in suits and put the remaining ones in yellow vests into the parking lot and get rid of the little building?! This industry couldn't seem more ready for disruption.
- wheels 5y ago
  I don't know how popular car sharing is in the US, but it's common in a lot of European cities, and there's literally nothing to renting a car (either short term or multiple days, admittedly, not at great prices for multiple days) than choosing one in an app and driving off. They validate your driver's license when you sign up. I suspect the reason the counter is there is to upsell people, and that car rental companies make significantly more money because of that bad experience. But god, I would and do pay a premium to not have to deal with that crap.
  - ajmurmann 5y ago
    How does the pickup work with car sharing? Do I have to the owners house? I also have to admit that probably 90% of my annoyances comes from a mental issue I have where it really, really bothers me when I think something could be more efficient than it is, when I'm not impacted.
tapland 5y ago
The same reason the software is ass at the car mechanic when they want to order parts: Legacy systems running on old VAXes, with UX upgrades consisting of screen scraping and fields you have to tab between. And if you miss one: You gotta tab all the way until it wraps around and back to where you were. The systems are often blazing fast underneath, but these crazy tab-forcing-90s-looking-UIs are stupidly common in airlines, car renrals, part ordering, smaller banks and anything else that started using centralized computer systems early but didn't expose those systems to end users.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  I can hit the tab key 10 times in the time it takes my hand to reach the mouse and start to move it. And shift-Tab moves the other way, so if you miss a field you can go back with one keystroke. I hate web forms that don't support tab key navigation between fields.
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    Do most people prefer to work that way, and are you representative of most people? If many people have an issue with the UX paradigm, which is more likely, that they all are wrong, or that the one thing in common is the thing that's suboptimal?
    - Beldin 5y ago
      Folks whose main job is to fill in a specific UI ought to be(come, swiftly) much, much better at using that UI than Joe Average User. Sort of like how prior to barcode scanners in cash registers at supermarkets, the person working the till would become familiar using a numeric keypad fast, as well as with the prices of often-bought items.
    - systemvoltage 5y ago
      I’ve worked with “most people”. Ran Workstream (AS 400 based) manufacturing (MRP) system with 200 operators. Every single operator preferred keyboard and DOS-like interface. Management tried to implement a browser based UI and it sucked so much. There is a time and place for good ol keyboard driven UI. Don’t throw the baby with the whole bathtub. I’d argue that most modern UI/UX sucks but that’s debatable. But legacy UI is fricking amazing in some cases. Also: Shift + Tab can be implemented and it would solve your gripe.
jjav 5y ago
While that's indeed true, there's an easy way around it by joining their frequent renter club (whatever each one calls it). Bypass that desk entirely, go straight to car (in most locations, not all unfortunately). I'm no frequent renter, maybe once every other year, but still it works great.
kwhitefoot 5y ago
I only ever had this problem when renting in the US (especially with Hertz). Here in Norway it went like this last time I rented: - walk up to counter - announce my name - show my driving license - get handed the keys - get told where the car is - say goodbye Total time, roughly thirty seconds. Even in a UK airport where there will quite likely be a queue the actual transaction will only be a few minutes.
- brnt 5y ago
  I have found large variance on checkout processes between (European) countries. Take supermarkets. I lived in the NL, where scan, bag & pay takes 30 seconds to a minute, with a cart full maybe 1:30. The I moved to France where old people might take that long just to reach out and sign their checks. Once I saw a sign at the Auchan boasting that the handle customers on average in under 4 minutes now. I sometimes would wait 30mins in line. In the NL, I would never (have to) put up with that. Its weird they wouldn't drive 150km to learn how to save sooo much time, not just the customer but also their own labour costs.
et2o 5y ago
I’ve never had it take longer than 5 minutes for them at the computer… when and where has it taken them 3 minutes?

vmarsy 5y ago

It might be network slowness, one day at the rental counter all the paperwork had to be done by hand (and visa contacted by phone to process payment) because their system was down. It took a literal hour. The terminal was unresponsive and displaying the following error: "cannot connect to mainframe" (This was in 2019).

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

antsar 5y ago

One guess, from recent experience at Enterprise: so that you're nice and exhausted by the time they quickly flip to the signatures page, which is your first and last chance to catch whatever bullshit fees they tacked on. That was a $100+ lesson, and my credit card sided w/ Enterprise when I tried to dispute (because of course, my signature is right there on the contract).

toddsiegel 5y ago

I feel like this too, but only when other people are at the counter. When I’m at the counter the whole thing never seems to take more than a few minutes. It’s always quick, and smooth, and I’m out of there, seemingly, in no time at all. I desperately want to know what other people are saying or doing at the rental car counter.

mitigating 5y ago
They probably didn't rent online
- ajmurmann 5y ago
  Maybe adding a surcharge for walk-ins or having a separate line for them seems like the way to go. Or maybe don't allow them at all and lay off the staff saved.
Ontonator 5y ago
The longer someone is at the counter, the more likely you are to see them. You’re biased towards seeing the relatively few people who take half an hour.
- ajmurmann 5y ago
  But those are also the people who ruin it for everyone. Why not heavily optimize for the 90% good case via full automation and discourage time intensive behavior. I'm thinking either only taking online reservations or doing a 30% surcharge for walk-ins. The happy case should be that I book online, I get a parking spot location where the car is and a QR code I show on exit. Hertz Gold at SFO is like 80% there, yet the normal case remains having to walk to a desk. It seems in their interest to discourage going to the desk as much as possible.
  - jackson1442 5y ago
    Would be interesting if they offered a subscription service and/or loyalty tier that gives you "real" reservations. Call it "$BRAND Car Guarantee." That way, you know that the customers are committing to actually get their cars, and you can make a term of service that you don't miss N cars per T time (this would be displayed prominently - call it something friendly like "house rules"). Boom, everyone's happy. Your repeat customers are more likely to stay that way, and people will hear about this and _become_ repeat customers because that's what it incentivizes. You can keep prices cheap by overbooking your non-loyalty cars like you already do.
  - llampx 5y ago
    How would they upsell you on insurance and extras if you didn't have any interactions with a sales agent? Honest question.
- zhte415 5y ago
  I'm reminded of this train/bus is taking ages to come. If one comes, say, every 15 minutes, that's an average waiting time of 7.5 minutes (and there's a +/- of around a minute for whether the 'time' is arrival, doors opening, closing, departure, depending on one's perspective of which 'time' is important to them). If one's already there, or comes within 1-2 minutes, that's perceptively close to time = 0, which pushes out perceived average waiting time to 8-9 minutes with times approaching or exceeding average waiting time having a disproportionately negative perception (your total journey time/connection impact, expectation of unannounced cancellation, etc, increasing). Nifty modern stuff like indicator boards work to re-align these perceptions. Passage of time is also quite non-linear - back to the ATM queue. When using the ATM I'm engaged in a series of short-term tasks, just as writing a comment on HN when sitting on the subway causes stations to pass 'faster'. And back to the ATM - I'm sure there's someone somewhere in a retail banking team that measures average interaction with ATM timings. Do they read HN or would like to comment?
lowercased 5y ago
Same thing at drive up ATMs. it feels like people are applying for a mortgage or opening retirement accounts when I'm behind them waiting. And... I know it's an exaggeration, but often I will time the person or people in front of me. Someone taking up to 1 minute - I don't generally mind (unless theres 3 people ahead of me). However, I've often sat behind someone who takes 3-4 minutes, and I can not figure out what the hell they're doing. That said, I think I've only used an ATM 3x in the past year, so this may mostly be a thing of the past now.
- CydeWeys 5y ago
  I have been, in the past, that annoying person taking up lots of time at the ATM. Here's what I was doing: Depositing lots of checks (up to a dozen at once), with an ATM that in theory supported depositing a whole stack at once but in practice spat them back most of the time if you put in more than one. Oh, and you have to key in the value of each check, and navigate menu options after each individual check deposit. I was very damn efficient considering how much I was doing, but it still took a decent amount of time.
  - dustintrex 5y ago
    As a non-American, the very idea of having to drive somewhere to physically deposit pieces of paper to transfer money around sounds absurd to the point of hilarity.
    - iamtedd 5y ago
      I bought my current car second-hand from a dealer. The best interest rate I could get by far was the line-of-credit loan I already had for my house. I bought the car on my credit card and eventually paid for it with the loan. Automatically done by the bank, of course. Even handling cash feels slightly old-fashioned to me.
      - kleiba 5y ago
        I live in a country that still mostly prefers cash to electronic money transfers for many transactions. The individual reasons for that vary but mine is that I want to minimize the ability of third parties to profile me through my purchases (neither stores nor my bank).
llampx 5y ago
Seriously, I have seen this phenomenon at government offices as well. Every other appointment seems to take ages, and mine takes a fraction of the time, no matter the outcome.
e_proxus 5y ago
The key is preparation. It’s the same for me at hotel check-ins. I’m always prepared, I have all my info available in my mobile or on paper, I’ve already thought about the trip several times before and on the way. Some people seem utterly unprepared. They either don’t have their info at all, or have to login to their web mail, or find some printed paper at the bottom of their enormous suitcase. And then they tend to have tons of questions. I check out the facilities beforehand online so I know what to expect and how to use them.
- cpcallen 5y ago
  I recently rented a car for the first time, with a co-driver. The rental was paid in advance online (which seemed to be the norm here in the UK) and I thought it was going to be fairly straightforward and quick to collect the car. Instead, after waiting about 15 minutes for the single person ahead of us in line to be processed, we were met with a series of demands for various sorts of verification and documentation that has not been mentioned in the online checkout process. This included having to use a .gov.uk website to get a code that would allow the company to validate our driving licences, and provide a proof of address (despite our addresses being printed on our government-issued, just-verified-authentic driver's licences.) The whole process took nearly half an hour just at the desk. I am glad that there was no one waiting in line behind us most of that time. I've now joined ZipCar and will hopefully never have to deal with a traditional car hire company again.
  - avianlyric 5y ago
    Car rental in the U.K. as a U.K. resident is more complicated than car rental as a non-U.K. resident. Not 100% sure why, but it seems that U.K. residents are required to basically do full IDV (which requires two proofs of address) and prove they have no points in their licence. None of this applies to non-U.K. residents, which probably make up the majority of customers, so the rental website usually put all these details in the fine print. Also while your looking at Zipcar (which is great) also take a peek at Virtuo. Only place I’ve ever enjoyed renting a car from.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
sjg007 5y ago
There's always someone trying to get a discount or unhappy with their car or something. This is why you join the rewards program, preregister and do the walk out program where everything is all preset and ready to go.
spurgu 5y ago
In Europe the companies I've dealt with try to confuse you into buying various insurances, where you were under the impression that you had already paid for it when doing the online booking. Figuring out what the actual situation is takes time. Tip: Do your research and read the fine print online before you leave for your trip.
bennysomething 5y ago
Standing at the counter is June at as bad, I'm still wondering wtf the guy is looking at on his screen

hasmanean 5y ago

Hrmpph…obviously they’re not rewriting it in assembly behind the counter—that would be stupid. They’re doing a full build—recompiling it and running basic unit tests on it.

kubanczyk 5y ago
> recompiling it and running basic unit tests on it And this is CI/CD done right. As soon as they commit a bug fix, the very next customer can use it.

ajmurmann 5y ago

Why is there even a counter? With Hertz Gold we just get a text message that tells us where the car is. We get in. Papers and key are in there and those get checked for about ten seconds at the exit. That's it. So much more effective for everyone. Budget's equivalent has a weird board that someone needs to update with the info. So much more effective for company and customers. However, for some reason that's the premium experience for which you party the loyalty program. It makes no sense to me that this isn't the heavily encouraged experience. I'd want to make this the only experience so that I have happier customers and can fire large portions of the counter staff. Ideally the paperwork that's in the car right now would be a PDF as well, so that you can lay off the people who do the printing. When I return cars at my local Enterprise it's so absurd. I have to park the car to then go into a little house where I wait in line to talk to a guy in a suit who then runs out to check on the car to then come back in and tell me we are all set. Hertz at SFO had people with iPads where you park the car and you are out in under a minute. Why doesn't Enterprise fire half the guys in suits and put the remaining ones in yellow vests into the parking lot and get rid of the little building?! This industry couldn't seem more ready for disruption.

wheels 5y ago
I don't know how popular car sharing is in the US, but it's common in a lot of European cities, and there's literally nothing to renting a car (either short term or multiple days, admittedly, not at great prices for multiple days) than choosing one in an app and driving off. They validate your driver's license when you sign up. I suspect the reason the counter is there is to upsell people, and that car rental companies make significantly more money because of that bad experience. But god, I would and do pay a premium to not have to deal with that crap.
- ajmurmann 5y ago
  How does the pickup work with car sharing? Do I have to the owners house? I also have to admit that probably 90% of my annoyances comes from a mental issue I have where it really, really bothers me when I think something could be more efficient than it is, when I'm not impacted.

tapland 5y ago

The same reason the software is ass at the car mechanic when they want to order parts: Legacy systems running on old VAXes, with UX upgrades consisting of screen scraping and fields you have to tab between. And if you miss one: You gotta tab all the way until it wraps around and back to where you were. The systems are often blazing fast underneath, but these crazy tab-forcing-90s-looking-UIs are stupidly common in airlines, car renrals, part ordering, smaller banks and anything else that started using centralized computer systems early but didn't expose those systems to end users.

throwawayboise 5y ago
I can hit the tab key 10 times in the time it takes my hand to reach the mouse and start to move it. And shift-Tab moves the other way, so if you miss a field you can go back with one keystroke. I hate web forms that don't support tab key navigation between fields.
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  Do most people prefer to work that way, and are you representative of most people? If many people have an issue with the UX paradigm, which is more likely, that they all are wrong, or that the one thing in common is the thing that's suboptimal?
  - Beldin 5y ago
    Folks whose main job is to fill in a specific UI ought to be(come, swiftly) much, much better at using that UI than Joe Average User. Sort of like how prior to barcode scanners in cash registers at supermarkets, the person working the till would become familiar using a numeric keypad fast, as well as with the prices of often-bought items.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    I’ve worked with “most people”. Ran Workstream (AS 400 based) manufacturing (MRP) system with 200 operators. Every single operator preferred keyboard and DOS-like interface. Management tried to implement a browser based UI and it sucked so much. There is a time and place for good ol keyboard driven UI. Don’t throw the baby with the whole bathtub. I’d argue that most modern UI/UX sucks but that’s debatable. But legacy UI is fricking amazing in some cases. Also: Shift + Tab can be implemented and it would solve your gripe.

jjav 5y ago

While that's indeed true, there's an easy way around it by joining their frequent renter club (whatever each one calls it). Bypass that desk entirely, go straight to car (in most locations, not all unfortunately). I'm no frequent renter, maybe once every other year, but still it works great.

kwhitefoot 5y ago

I only ever had this problem when renting in the US (especially with Hertz). Here in Norway it went like this last time I rented: - walk up to counter - announce my name - show my driving license - get handed the keys - get told where the car is - say goodbye Total time, roughly thirty seconds. Even in a UK airport where there will quite likely be a queue the actual transaction will only be a few minutes.

brnt 5y ago
I have found large variance on checkout processes between (European) countries. Take supermarkets. I lived in the NL, where scan, bag & pay takes 30 seconds to a minute, with a cart full maybe 1:30. The I moved to France where old people might take that long just to reach out and sign their checks. Once I saw a sign at the Auchan boasting that the handle customers on average in under 4 minutes now. I sometimes would wait 30mins in line. In the NL, I would never (have to) put up with that. Its weird they wouldn't drive 150km to learn how to save sooo much time, not just the customer but also their own labour costs.

et2o 5y ago

I’ve never had it take longer than 5 minutes for them at the computer… when and where has it taken them 3 minutes?