One of the biggest benefits of booking your car hire through a broker instead of going direct is that a broker can maintain and negotiate deals with multiple providers. This means better prices, more inclusions and the added protection of anything that the broker adds. We’ve talked plenty about why you should book car rental through a broker before.
Other than these benefits, we think that all car hire brokers have a huge responsibility too. Car rental brokers can shield customers from bad providers, they should trust the car rental providers they work with and they should be able to vouch for them.
You shouldn’t have to decide for yourself who to trust, car hire brokers should ONLY show you providers you can trust.
This is a role we take very seriously, big name brokers working with and giving exposure to the worst car hire providers out there only exposes more people to terrible car hire.
How we monitor the car providers we work with.
Our monitoring of the car rental providers we work with goes far beyond just showing customer reviews of individual providers. For us, this process starts before we ever begin to work with a provider.
We have quite strict requirements of the providers we work with so before you ever see them on our site, you can be sure that we’ve done our homework on exactly the type of provider they are. We’ll look at everything they offer…
To work with us, a car hire provider must:
- Provide excellent customer service
- Have a fleet of the latest model vehicles in great condition
- Not have a history of hard-sells and other bad practices
- Have a healthy reputation within the industry
- Offer a competitive price with great inclusions
Ultimately when looking at their service we’re trying to answer one question, do they provide the excellent customer service we and our customers expect? If the answer to that is no, you’ll never see them on our site.
Along with this, the team here also work hard to negotiate the best deals and inclusions. This is how we’re able to offer free-additional drivers, lower deposits, unlimited mileage, free child-seats and so much more with locations and providers that other brokers simply can’t.
Once we’re happy with the service offered and the inclusions available, we’ll begin to show a provider on our site. For so many brokers this is where the process ends but this isn’t the case for us, we think this process should be constantly ongoing. This early review process is also a big part of how we build such close relationships with our providers too.
When a provider is live on our site and customers can book with them, we keep asking these questions. We do this in a few ways. We’re always asking for your feedback on each provider, we’re always in communication with providers to sort any issues that do crop up and we make sure we’re up to date with how that provider is doing with other customers, not just Zest customers. We use all of this information to build a constantly ongoing picture of how that provider is doing.
If we see that their standards are starting to drop, we take a proactive approach to sorting it out. We use our good relationships with providers to intervene and ask why problems are occurring and if they’re being sorted.
These problems can be small one-off issues, or they can be systemic issues but either way, we’re aware of the situation. We do our best to help providers with falling standards but ultimately, if our answer to “does this provider offer excellent service?” ever becomes a solid “no”, then we’ll stop working with them.
We’ll stop working with a provider if they consistently:
- Demonstrate continued bad service with no improvement
- Receive continual negative feedback from our customers
- Give us any concerns about the age, reliability or safety of their vehicles
This rigorous process of evaluating all of our car hire providers is something that we genuinely feel makes a difference to the service we provide. A car hire broker’s role should be more than just a website where you can book from multiple providers.
