Wheels when you don’t remember you want them

by david on December 18, 2006

Just for full transparency, nudge to Grace for keeping me honest, my friend Laura at LexPR arranged for me to have a complimentary Zipcar membership. Basically, I pay for my usage of the Toronto fleet. I’ve had a few things to say about my Zipcar experience.

Photo by Matthew Clark Photography

I booked Millgrove 3 and headed off to a meeting. I thought I had booked the car for 4 hours, 10:30am until 2:30pm. Two things, turns out I did not book the car for this period of time (only 10:30am until 2pm) and the meeting started late and ran long (ending around 3:45pm). I happen to realize this around 2:20pm. I called Zipcar spoke to a CSR named Jeff, who was extremely friendly and helpful. He checked to see if the car was still available (and I had not inconvienced anyone), my Zipcar history and since I did not have a history of returning late, he’d extend the reservation and not charge me any late fees. Yeah!

Great customer experience! World class. Fantastic job by the Zipcar team in making me feel like a valued customer. We’ve had such a great experience with Zipcar that I’ve started to use them more. Kristin has signed up for a membership. We continue to use other rental services, particularly when we need to go on longer trips, i.e., down to London to see my family. But generally the Zipcar has met our automobile needs living in Toronto. Ryan insists on Autoshare, but for us we’re sticking with Zipcar.

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  • David Crow

    Ahhh, the joys of fanatics. My guess is that the costs are very similar.





    The AutoShare pricing would be 6 hours * $9.50/hour = $57.00 plus taxes plus $25.00/year amortized over number of trips. My Zipcar trip was 6 hours * $11.00/hour = $66.00 plus taxes. There's a $9.00 difference, which is 15.79% greater. This does not include the membership fee from Zipcar. Assuming that I use the service twice per month that mean a simplistic amortization of $1/trip. That would be 13.79% difference. There are other Zipcar plans that reduce the rate to $9.90.





    I won't argue with Ryan that Zipcar appears to be slightly more expensive. There are still advantages including:





    <ul><li>Multiple cities in North America and now London</li>

    <li> Remote access to the car, to be able to unlock when you loose or lock your keys in the car</li></ul>



    Investigate the choices, make your own decision. There are a lot of degrees of freedom in making this choice. Price. Nationality. Location. Features. Services.

  • Ryan

    And how much did that trip cost you? Add an update when your invoice comes in. AutoShare will beat ZipCar by price every time, plus it's Canadian owned.

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