Here is the email I sent to customer service when the manager at the Henderson location said she was not with the power to provide any refund.
Cruise America customer service offered $73 and a $50 gift card for ruining our once a year family vacation.
To Cruise America Customer Service,
My husband and I rented an RV this weekend from Friday through Monday (6/27-6/30). We had a terrible experience.
The first night was a no-go. After loading the RV for two hours, the rooftop AC stopped working. It was blowing hot air from outside only. My husband spent a long time on the phone with agents trying to reset CGI, but no agent could locate it. The AC worked in the morning, so we figured it was good. But it was not. It was intermittent, at best. It would blow cold temporarily and then just phase out. We sweltered.
There was only one working outlet in the whole vehicle above the table. No other outlet worked at all--not outside--not anywhere.
The water pump did not work so unless we were fully hooked up at a paying campsite, we were unable to have running water.
The toilet smelled so awful it's indescribable. When you flushed the toilet with the lid down, the water would spray forcibly out the sides and wet the floor and surrounding area. It was gross. In the little crevice between the toilet and the shower, there was an accumulation of hair and grime (likely feces, urine, whatever else goes in a toilet) that had obviously never been tended to. What's worse is the one (and only) time I used the kitchen sink to wash dishes at the campground (with their running water hooked up), when I pulled the plug, the stench of sewage, sulfuric and strong, deemed the RV uninhabitable for over an hour. I did not do dishes, wash hands, or use the sink thereafter. The smell was so pervasive that it impacted others and made sitting at the outdoor table embarrassing for my family. The adjacent campsites near to us were gagging and asking what was going on. It was utterly humiliating.
The drivability was awful. My husband has a CDL and knows his trucks. Shocks are blown, and the RV barely felt like it safely held the road. Also, the entire cabin above the truck sounded like it would separate and suction back on with every compression. The entire RV sounded like a bucket of loose nails. We are not experts, but it didn't sound like an acceptable or normal RV sound. Internally, magnets did not hold the cupboards shut while driving so they opened and slammed around loudly and our stuff fell out. Sitting as a passenger was quite like being on the hot seat--the floor board and center console were BURNING hot because there is no insulation between the rider and the exhaust running below the boards. It was dangerous, and I had to keep my kids away.
The floor on the RV is corroded and water rotted--the floor boards were duct taped together and separated and actually sliced the side of my 2 year old's pinky toe. Although a seemingly minor injury, it ended up ruining our ability to pretty much do anything that required shoes because he would break down crying and refused to walk because of the cut on his pinky toe. He's two, and it was the end of his world. Moreover, we all spent our time trying not to trip over the flooring and hurt ourselves, but it was a 8-10 inch slice in the very middle of the main area that separated more than the depth of my sole of my shoe when either side of the floor was stepped on so we all tripped often. Sand seemed to continually appear from the crack in the floor and that made the rest of the flooring dangerously slippery for our kids. We swept with the provided broom that had a splintering and duct taped handle constantly but the sand was persistent. Flooring was nailed and duct taped indiscriminately pretty much everywhere in the RV.
Other things, such as the razor sharp serrated edge of the plastic cover to the handles on the RV door, and the equally sharp and painful serrated edge of the table, or the exposed metal edging that was installed to compensate for some previous problem on the side of the stove that was missing its cover, were painful when touched. It made having kids in the RV an absolute nightmare.
We dropped it off today (6/30 around 10:25 am) and the manager at the Las Vegas location did the walk through with us and apologized for our experience and documented all the above. She tried the water pump--it did not work for her either. She saw all of the sharp exposed edges, nails, and the floorboards which had been duct-taped together and separated. We explained the humiliation of the sink draining fiasco.
We totally missed out on the first night of this trip and then suffered through the others because of the condition of this RV and that it lacked pretty much all amenities promised. The time, effort, and opportunity to even have a vacation for us is limited, and this ended up destroying our trip. Our young sons went from loving the vacation to begging to go home. read more