Complaint Review: Prime Time Shuttle

It's been my pleasure.

Bobby Gibson
Prime Time Shuttle
Marketing Manager
bobbyg@primetimeshuttle.com

Thanks for getting back to me.  I appreciate you getting back to me.  I'm slightly regretful of taking a scorched Earth approach to what seems more like a single point failure to me now.  

Anyways, once a report is up on here, I can't remove it, but your dedication to customer service will clearly show to anyone that reads this report and I think it reflects upon you in a very good light.  

Your drivers have always been very good to me, and maybe you'll see me in the future.  Thanks again for the refund and working through this issue with me.

Please don't take this as debating or arguing. Just covering the information so that you or whoever else reads this knows that we do care and are working to address the issues.

1. I totally agree that our customer service department needs work. Within the last month we've hired a new customer service manager, are installing a phone system that will allow us to record phone calls and are going through the hiring process to bring in 4 customer service reps when the job used to be done by 1.

So no use arguing there... I agree 100%.  I've passed on the name of the rep you dealt with to the CS manager.

2. We do track flight information. I don't know the details about this particular situation, but depending upon when the information for the flight was updated to our system vs. the reservation being dispatched it failed to get to us before the reservation was dispatched.

3. Just to clarify, the "non refund" example I provided was if a flight was missed/delayed/redirected and you ended up not getting to a hotel you had a reservations for. all hotels I've dealt with, or had customers complain to me about, wouldn't refund the missed night since technically that hotel room was not available for another customer to use.

4. All refunds should show up on credit card statements within 10 business days. I don't know where the ball got dropped or why the supervisor didn't submit the refund.

Bobby Gibson

Prime Time Shuttle

bgibson@primetimeshuttle.com

"A flight being redirected to another airport isn't Prime Time Shuttles fault... We had to pay the driver to be there on-time even though the customer was not there. We realize the flight being redirected was not the customers fault either... but yet it cost Prime Time Shuttle the full payment of the fare to the driver and it cost the custsomer nothing..."

This is why you have a dispatch center and track flight updates.  I'm not privy to the information you may or may not have had, given the blackout occurred more than 4 hours before I landed, most likely someone in your organization failed to identify a change.  

"A missed hotel or flight reservation would not have refunded the money..."

Actually they do.  While your analogy isn't quite germane to the situation, if I were to show up for a scheduled flight and the plane isn't there or isn't ready, they will refund your or make preparations to get you a different flight.  

"But our supervisor made the right call and told the customer that they would be refunded for the original trip."

I appreciated this.  At least until almost a week later the charges were still present and I called to inquire and got...

"Our customer service department made a mistake in telling the customer that only a 50% refund was advailable since they were trying to cover part of the cost we had to pay the driver."

A couple of issues:

1) Not having the refund as promised deducted automatically is operating in bad faith and poor bookkeeping.  I should not have to call to remind you.

2) Your customer service representative was set up from point #1, however he was nothing short of combative (his name was Christian).  I calmly explained to him my situation but he just wanted to argue with me and not advance my inquiry up his chain of command.  

"We have since refunded the entire fare once a manager was made aware of the situwation."

Thank you.  Some points to consider moving forward:

- Please be prompt in your bookkeeping, or if there are delays let your customer know a timetable.  

- Fix your customer service department.  If there is a discrepancy from what he sees on his screen and what I am saying, his course of action should not be to squabble with me.  Wouldn't this have been much easier if he just took a few minutes to investigate?  It wastes both of our time to deal with outside arbitration when this should have taken 5 minutes. 

A flight being redirected to another airport isn't Prime Time Shuttles fault... We had to pay the driver to be there on-time even though the customer was not there. We realize the flight being redirected was not the customers fault either... but yet it cost Prime Time Shuttle the full payment of the fare to the driver and it cost the custsomer nothing... A missed hotel or flight reservation would not have refunded the money...

But our supervisor made the right call and told the customer that they would be refunded for the original trip. Our customer service department made a mistake in telling the customer that only a 50% refund was advailable since they were trying to cover part of the cost we had to pay the driver.

We have since refunded the entire fare once a manager was made aware of the situwation.

Bobby Gibson

Marketing Manager

Prime Time Shuttle

It does no good to file your complaint on Yelp. More people will realize what a ripoff Prime Time shuttle is because NOTHING is ever deleted here, as with YELP. Now if more people would Google "PRIME TIME SHUTTLE SUCKS" this site would show up. I'm gonna include what Casper from YELP told me about how the filters on YELP work too.

AUG 05, 2011  |  04:51PM PDT

Hi there,

Thanks for contacting us.

We relegate less reliable reviews to a filtered review page (viewable by clicking on the link at the bottom of any business profile page). The filter is designed to protect against fake reviews, including those that might be written by a competitor or a disgruntled former employee. Since its not always easy to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys, the system sometimes affects perfectly legitimate reviews, especially those that are written by less established users.

Some businesses might fear that they are being singled out among the millions of businesses on Yelp. Rest assured, the review filter is automated to reduce human bias.  It affects both positive and negative reviews, and doesnt have
anything to do with whether a business is an advertiser or not.  Unfortunately, because it's an automated system, I can't manually override which reviews it affects. However, these filtered reviews may find their way back onto your main profile page as the reviewers become more established on Yelp.

We created a video that explains our review filter here: http://officialblog.yelp.com/2010/03/yelp-review-filter-explained.html

Regards,

Casper

Yelp User Support

San Francisco, California