During my time at the Airport, some of the expectations were unrealistic. For example, when checking a customer back in you'd be expected to shake the customers hand whilst holding a torch, an ipad, a printer, an umbrella and a clipboard to take feedback (with pen). And if you didn't find a way to juggle all this, you'd fail the audit.
Moved to a small branch in Stirling in 2015. With less people to serve customers you would spend most of the day either picking customers up, giving them a ride back, delivering cars to corporate accounts or picking cars up from other branches. This meant you had very little time to do training. The constant driving all starts to become mentally exhausting.
You're contract to work 50 hours. You'll work around 60 hours if you're a trainee and close to 70 hours a week if you're an Assistant or Branch Manager. We started at 07:45 (other branches started earlier!) and we would usually finish at 18:30. A lot of the time we'd finish closer to 19:00 and occasionally you'd be working till 20:00 - 22:00.
Upper management are in control of the online booking system and they will rarely turn this to 'sold out'. This means that you will have bookings come through at 17:00 for a car at 08:00 the next morning and you have to go find a car. So you might be travelling to a branch 30-50 miles away to get the car and by the time you get back to your branch it's 21:00 and you've got 7 hours before you're up getting ready for your next shift.
Would I recommend this to a friend? No chance. This job is awful. The upper management are terrible. The retention rate is probably close to 70%. I've seen fellow trainees walk out, seen Assistant Managers walk out and Branch Managers force out of the company.
Being with the company for a year and a half, I've been to 2 branches and had 5 different branch managers. People are leaving all the time because it's so bad - which is why you claim fast career progression - because you'd be filling in from the person who has just quit due to the amount of crap.
