Super inconvenient Myles Self Drive Booking modification process

I've hinted this several times (such as in this post), but in past 2 years, Carzonrent Myles hasn't bothered to implement a proper reservation management system. Carzonrent Myles has good collection of cars, lots of locations (Mysuru and Mangaluru was added recently) and cheap rates. All these are good, but this post is about their booking tool which is age old.

Any booking will need modifications, cancellations etc. But Carzonrent's self drive booking system has no provision for any kind of modifications. When I book a car on self drive, there could be many situations demanding a modification- such as

• Number of people joining the trip may increase/decrease, prompting change of car from a 5 seater to 7/8 seater or vice versa
• Pickup/drop off time might vary by a few hours as travel plans get fine tuned or train/flight gets delayed.
• We might have to cut short/extend a trip, resulting in partial cancellation or extension.

But Myles's solution for all of these is that you've to cancel your booking first and make an all new booking. Even the call centre can't do modification from backend.

Now, this causes many inconvenience:

1. By the time current booking is cancelled, new booking is made, it is possible that someone else might book the same car and availability may become zero. There is no provision to block the car for sometime. Big problem during peak season.

2. Amount paid takes its own time to get refunded. 3-10 working days usually.

3. All details have to be reentered again, including having to make fresh payment even where there's nothing extra to pay (or when we should be actually getting a refund)

Being able to modify a booking is a very basic functionality in any reservation management system. But the bosses at Carzonrent seem to be very ignorant of their software system- what it can and can't do. Rival zoomcar has much sophisticated website, which allows easy modifications/extensions, app based booking/pickup etc.

Carzonrent has been issuing press releases of targeting 5000 self drive cars in their fleet by 2016, 40000 cars in next few years etc. All these is good but getting fundamentals right is even more important. They have about 700 cars as of now way disproportionate to 5000 target of next year. Let us see.

If you allow modifications, customers will modify their existing booking. If I have to cancel completely and rebook, at times I might re-book with competition as well.

I was thinking this is a small issue they should be fixing anytime soon. But as I don't see any updates to their websites over years, I guess they aren't making any serious attempts towards customer convenience. Hence this topic warranted a full post.

Today I also had a more peculiar issue- their call centre was very inconsistent. I wanted to modify a booking- on first call, lady in the call centre asked me to call the Mangalore fleet guys to cancel the booking. This was strange, as all previous cancellations were done by calling their call centre. Nevertheless, I called the Mangalore fleet guy's number- no one bothered to pickup or call back, so I called main call centre again- some other guy attended my call and he could cancel my booking. Also while one lady says 3-4 days time for refund, another guy says 7-10 days. Their call centre folks might need some training to ensure consistent experience to the customers