I would STRONGLY recommend that anyone considering using this service try someone else.
We booked a limo for an event we were having in Hollywood. When asked for the location, I gave them the very recognizable "W Hollywood" hotel, and explained we wanted looping trips for guests from the hotel to a venue just a 5 minute drive away, the "Avalon Hollywood". They did not ask for an address, said they knew where it was, all was well. We talked for a while about how close it was to the destination, that it was just so VIP guests could make an entrance in style, etc.
I called back 2 days before our event, spoke to the same woman each time (didn't get her name) made sure all was well, and explained again that what we were doing was just very quick back and forth to the venue just 5 mins away from the W Hollywood. They said we were all set. The woman was very nice on the phone for both calls. Again, HOLLYWOOD was mentioned multiple times.
Turns out someone put down the wrong address, and put the W Hotel in Beverly Hills instead. So the driver was VERY late because once he realized it, with traffic, it took him a while to get to the right place. By then our VIP guests had mostly given up waiting. One who stuck it out missed her window as a red carpet interviewer at our event, after traveling from another state to attend and take part.
We realize mistakes happen, and we almost never bother to leave bad reviews of a company. But here's the part that was the kicker for all this:
When my business partner called to explain what happened, a person called "Andy" shifted the blame to us. He claimed they sent an email with the wrong address, so the whole thing was apparently our fault for not seeing it. (I eventually found this email in a junk folder and honestly looking at it now, even if I had seen it, it would be easy to overlook the tiny details.)
Not appreciating the inability of this company to accept any responsibility for their mistakes with my business partner, I called this Andy and tried to recap what happened, but he barely wanted to let me talk. When he eventually let me recap, there was ZERO effort whatsoever to try and make a bad situation right, or, that I remember, even to APOLOGIZE for what happened, which frankly would have been good enough for me. "We clearly put down the wrong address, we're very sorry for this, etc., we try but mistakes sometimes happen." Wouldn't be hard, and case closed.
I would explain to Andy that relying on emails (BTW especially ones that don't require a response back acknowledging receipt) is folly as open rates for emails are extremely low, spam filters are strong, and inboxes are cluttered, but he wasn't interested in this reality. He was adversarial from the start (which just makes me upset), defensive, and accusatory.
When I told him if he didn't want to have a decent conversation about this we could just make with the reviews instead, he claimed I was "threatening" him and oddly warned he was "recording" the conversation. (Which by the way I was not notified of at the start of the call, and pretty sure if I recall correctly that it's illegal to record calls in California without first notifying the other party?)
At our event we had two attendees who showed up and had a bad experience. Although that situation wasn't our fault (they had a conflict with another attendee), we instantly expressed our regret that they had a bad experience, refunded their money (which was twice as much money as the limo cost) without question, and they're big fans of our company now. Customer service isn't that hard if you care about your customers having a good experience.
We had no bad issues with the driver Tim who was just put into a bad situation and did what he could. Even the woman who answered the phone originally was nice, so if the address was her mistake, guessing it was an honest one.
All that Andy had to do was accept the mistake happened, apologize, and we never would have left this review. As I said, mistakes happen, and I have no interest in causing hardships for businesses that make honest mistakes.
But Andy not properly owning up to the company's mistakes is why I'm spending the time to let others know about our opinion, which is that our experience with Ultimate Limousines was ultimately a very bad one. read more