“After reading these six confessions of a current Alamo car rental agent, you will learn:
- The commission hungry mindset of a car-rental agent
- How they’re always trying to get you to do unnecessary upgrades
- How the cost of these upgrades are discretionary, and therefore, negotiable
- What a “deeker” is
But most of all, you will learn just how much, for at least this Alamo agent, you are his absolute adversary in his battle to get you spring for costly upgrades and beef up his bonuses.
6. IT’S A SALES JOB
First I’d like to let the cat out of the bag. Yes, we car rental agents do work for commissions! If we can get you to pay more for an upgrade, insurance, gasoline, a GPS, even an additional driver, we get a cut of the extra charges.
5. I HATE “DEEKERS”
At Alamo Rent A Car in [redacted], we are handsomely rewarded for good sales and punished if our sales are poor. The pressure this environment produces leads many of us to fine tune our skills to not only offer extras effectively and to have comebacks to all customer rejections, but to also be able to identify the customers in line as to whether they are buyers or decliners, which we call “deekers”. When a customer declines everything you’ve offered, you’ve been “deeked”. Get deeked enough times by a certain type of customer and you begin to feel resentment towards that group. Sometimes a customer can’t be identified as a buyer or deeker until you see the state or country of the driver license. Evidently some states and countries produce more deekers than others. Deekers may at times be legitimate but often they are just cheap people.
4. CHEAP PEOPLE CAN’T FULLY ENJOY A VACATION
A typical example of a deeker is the young couple with two kids, a 3-year old and a 10-month old, on-line with strollers and packing their own child safety seats. He produces his license and credit card but she does all the talking. Offer them a more comfortable or fun vehicle than the sub-compact they have reserved and she will cut you off with a “no”. She will also cut you off when you offer her the peace of mind that the insurance will give her or the convenience of prepaying for the gasoline at a discounted rate. Of course there’s also a “no” to the GPS because she’ll raise the stack of MapQuest printouts in her folder. Listening in silence is the helpless husband as he looks on while imagining driving a sporty SUV instead of the tiny economy car reserved. Enough of these deekers and you may find yourself working in the exit booth of the garage the following month. This punishment can cost you thousands of dollars!
3. TO ALL YOU DEEKERS
First of all, you wonder how this family can fully enjoy its vacation. They are staying in a cheap motel far from the theme parks. The couple’s freedom to roam the theme parks with the kids and the strollers is limited. The kids are too young to have future memories of this trip anyway. You even wonder how this cheap couple is going to eat while on vacation. Are they going to smuggle peanut butter and jelly sandwiches into the theme parks to avoid paying the high priced foods there or are they just going to go hungry? Here’s a suggestion to those of you that fit this customer profile, leave the kids at home! Leave them with grandma or Aunt Betty and enjoy your vacation! Let your husband drive the SUV he’d like or treat yourselves to a convertible! Wander the theme parks freely and enjoy greater intimacy in a nicer hotel located closer to the parks. You’ll enjoy your vacation more and you will help me feed my family!” ( via consumerist.com)
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