Stuff I Can’t Understand When I Travel (Continued)...

Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay 

I rent cars pretty frequently when I travel, whether for work or for pleasure. When I do, the rental agency has me sign off on the various terms of the agreement. 

Will there be any additional drivers? Did I want their insurance coverage or did I have my own? Did I want to take advantage of their fuel option or would I prefer to fill the tank myself prior to return? All pretty standard stuff. 

But sometimes, that last question takes a little twist.

If I decide not to take the agency’s prepaid fuel option, then I’m asked to bring the car back at the same fuel level as when I got it. Most of the time, the tank’s full, so no problem there. But every now and then, the form shows the fuel tank isn’t full, instead it’s at some fraction of the full tank, sometimes half full, sometimes 5/8ths or 7/8ths (the gradations are often in eighths). 

So I always wonder, how am I supposed to fill it up to exactly that level? Gas stations (petrol stations for those outside the US) can’t know the capacity of your tank, and your car won’t tell you until after you’re done re-fueling. So basically you’re going to guesstimate, and more often than not, you’ll get it wrong. To be safe, you’ll likely overestimate and leave more in than what you originally had. Which ends up costing you more money.

I don’t know why (some) rental agencies do this. I get that it helps them - it probably saves someone at their end the effort to refill the tank and then - intentionally or not - they get to bank the excess fuel that you’ve filled as extra profit.

But it isn’t a very customer-centric approach. 

In my mind, the golden rule should always be to make the customer’s life as easy as possible. The less work the customer has to do - physically or mentally - the better, and the higher the potential satisfaction levels (all else being equal). 

And this should be a pretty easy fix. It just needs someone to put themselves in the customer’s shoes and think through the practical ramifications of the less-than-full fuel tank.

Make it part of the standard operating procedure that tanks must always be full. Or, better yet, maybe get rid of the fuel gauge on the form itself and if the customer finds it isn’t full, he/she gets a credit for the unused fraction on their rental bill. (That will eliminate less-than-full tanks very quickly.)

At any rate, the point is to make things easy for the customer. Simple steps. Higher satisfaction.