Where to start. I’ll be honest the job absolutely sucks. If Anyone and I mean ANYONE in daily rental tells you that they love their job, they are 100% lying to you or even themselves or just drunk on the green kool-aid. Everyone starts as a MT in daily rental and it’s where you have to prove yourself to get out to a different department. You will be treated absolutely terrible by customers because they don’t know the extreme stress you go through each and every day trying to make people with first world problems happy. You will get calls from customers complaining about everything under the sun. You will get old people who don’t know how open the gas cover. You will constantly be out of cars yet people can book online for any car they want .. then show up and say “it said it was available online” if I had a dollar for every time I was told that I’d be a millionaire. You will work 11-12 hours a day sometimes without a lunch depending if you get set up at a busy branch. If you decide to take a promotion to assistant or even branch manager you will have to deal with people not paying their bill or even stealing your cars. You become a debt collector. Then upper management will always blame you for it if you don’t report it quick enough or vise versa if you report it to quick then you will get scolded. It’s a lose lose. You will have to wash cars in dress clothes. I have ruined so many shirts and shoes. My advice: buy cheap dress shirts and shoes. God help you if you have to write a damage report. You will get yelled at for you doing your job writing a report on them damaging your rental. Especially if the customer didn’t cause the damage like parking lot damage or they failed to get the guilty parties insurance.
The worst part is dealing with insurance replacement customers because they don’t want to be there in the first place. they have dealt with the idiot that caused the accident, dealt with the insurance, the body shop, and finally they get to you and they are pissed off as soon as they see your smiling face. You better have a good enough rental car that matches what they are accustomed to like a Tahoe or Cadillac, leather power seats touch screen navigation etc. not to mention it had better be free for the customer even if the insurance company has only approved to pay for a compact economy car. It is 100% your fault, you, the enterprise worker, that they have to drive a small car. Then when they return the car at the end of the rental you better kiss their butts if you want to get that completely satisfied phone review they may get. It is a night mare or as we in the business call it “E-mares” when you sleep you will hear the phone ring in your dreams you will be at work in your dreams.
When you go to training you will spend 3 days going over how much money enterprise has made over the years, HR rules, and the founding values. ABSOLUTELY nothing about the day to day job. Then you will be thrown to the wolves on your first day. Get ready to get yelled at daily for something.
ERAC corporate is constantly gassing up how much money they make (multi billion in PROFIT after all expenses paid) but 2 months into a pandemic they laid off thousands of employees. what’s funny is i looked on jobs boards and I see THEY ARE HIRING. What gives?? They laid off thousands only to hire new people a month later.
I haven’t even started about the selling aspect. Let me tell you, if you want to make it there you need to be able to sell products that you wouldn’t even sell to your family. You are to sell 4 additional protection products when only 1 of them is halfway decent. Be prepared to get 3 no’s before you can let the customer go. Let me be clear this is not a management job, it’s 100% a sales job.
One of the pros I listed was the friendships you make. The con to that is most people don’t last. For instance. In my hiring group there were 8 of us that got hired at the same time and sat in the conference room together for onboarding. 3 months in there were 5 left. 5 month in there were 3 left and and 8 months in I was the LAST ONE. The friendships are amazing for as long as they last. The turn over is insane. Oh and the reason why they will be the best friends you have is because you will spend more time with them than you do family or loved ones.
It’s a good job for your resume out of college or if you are a glutton for punishment. If you want to make it big at Erac, you have to embrace the suck and get out of daily rental to a different department as soon as you can.
