Holding Reservations, aka, why U--Haul sucks

Remember that Seinfeld episode where Jerry goes to pick up his rental car reservation, and the woman tells him that there are no mid-size cars available? Here's the clip, in case you've never seen it:



U-Haul has the same problem as this rental car agency. A few weeks ago, my husband and I, along with his brother and sister-in-law, bought some new furniture. We got a pretty sweet leather couch; they got a coffee table, a bedroom set, and a new mattress. Since we all got the furniture from the same outlet store, and since we live 5 doors down from each other, we thought we'd rent a U-Haul, use it to bring all our stuff back from the store, and split the cost of renting it, instead of trying to get things home separately.

We went to the U-Haul website to reserve a 10' truck for the next day. We weren't sure what would be available, since it was only one day's notice, but the website gave us all these choices: how long do you want it? where do you want to pick it up? what size truck do you want? We were able to select the size truck that we wanted with the impression that we could have it at 10AM the next day. It looked like everything was going smoothly, and those of us making the reservation were impressed with how easy the whole thing was.

The next day, my sister-in-law gets a call from U-Haul. "I'm sorry, but we don't have anything available for you." "But we made a reservation!" "Well, our website doesn't guarantee any actual rental." "What's the point of a reservation, then?" "We might be able to make something available after 4 pm." "No, thanks."

As Jerry Seinfeld might have said: "The reservation makes sure that there's a truck here. That's why you have reservations." "I know why we have reservations." "I don't think you do."

U-Haul is correct in that their website doesn't guarantee anything. The small print on one of the first pages says, "The number of hours you request is noted as your preference. Because many families have already made reservations, the number of hours that can be scheduled for your rental is subject to availability. When a reservation is made, our regional office will handle your scheduling."

Ok, fine. You put small print on your webpage. But that does nothing to counteract the effect of all the slick drop-down menus, multiple options, and ease of choosing what kind of truck you want--all which suggest that any of U-Haul's trucks will be available for your disposal. Yes, you can point people to the small print (which none of them will read), OR you can change your system. Here are a few of my suggestions:

First, you could change what you call this form. Rather than a reservation form, it's a request form. That would certainly clear up the possibility that it's guaranteeing someone an actual truck when they want it. It makes the statement, "I'm sorry, we have nothing available" a lot less stupid sounding.

Or, the option I would prefer seeing, is to change the was reservations are made, so that some database actually keeps track of which trucks are reserved for which times, and then when a request is made, a computer system searches the database to see what's available. Especially since so much is done on computers already, how hard can that be? (Thousands of computer programmers now hate me, I'm sure, and I don't mean that writing the program would be easy. But I'm sure it could be done, and I think it would be easy to integrate into U-Haul's existing rental system). At any rate, then when someone went online to make a reservation, it would work like Travelocity, or some such site, where it gives you a list of trucks that are available at the times you want near where you want to pick it up. And if nothing is available, then you would get, "I'm sorry, but no results matched your search."

Honestly, would either of these options be so hard? It would deceive a lot fewer customers, and especially with the second option, make life easier for U-Haul employees in the long run. And it would do wonders for customer relations. Because when this happened to us, we heard 2 other stories about why U-Haul is so awful, and we've now resolved not to try to rent from U-Haul again. Sooner or later, the word's going to spread far enough that this policy is going to seriously hurt their business--why not change things before it does?