When does the new night owl pricing policy take effect? It is my understanding that the rates will be going up from $2 to half the car's daily hourly rate. Just curious to when this will occur.

Thanks.

-- Anonymous, March 23, 2004

Answers

This Friday, March 26th.

-- Anonymous, March 23, 2004

I knew NOTHING about this, and got slammed on the 28th with a rental, thinking the night owl rate was still $2.00. Not happy at all.

-- Anonymous, March 30, 2004

Zipcar is pretty sneaky. I don't think I will be using them much longer.

-- Anonymous, April 02, 2004

Ditto on the sneaky... be careful about their accounting systems, generally... their means of displaying credits and debits against an account is amateurish and difficult to read even on my simple account with very little activity. I can't even imagine what it would be like to audit a more complicated account. This is all very disappointing but i see little progress even over years of asking them to make the accounting legible and auditable.

-- Anonymous, June 28, 2004

I don't think Zipcar is "sneaky," but boy, do I agree that the statements are hard to read! I never have a clue why sometimes my monthly fee shows up in full, and sometimes it shows up in prorated chunks--I find the entire statement nearly impossible to decipher, and though I trust that I'm _not_ being charged double for monthly fees _and_ usage, I never can really convince myself of that by poring over the statements. Please, Zipcar, make them simpler!! (I said all this in a usage survey, but I figured I'd post it here in case other people had similar concerns.)

-- Anonymous, June 30, 2004

I strongly dislike the top-level accounting page of the website (my stuff --> account invoices).

1) The term "invoice" is used to describe a running (or historical) monthly summary. But it is not an invoice, because the charges are not billed on a monthly basis and instead are deducted from my credit card immediately after each usage.

2) Transactions are listed with earlier transactions first within each invoice group, but the invoice groups themselves are listed with earlier groups last. This leads to several unpleasant side effects: a) It is harder than it should be to reconcile my usage around the boundary of two invoice groups since my eye has to jump back and forth between the end of group A and the start of group B. b) The most recent transaction is often not at the very start or the end of the list; it is buried at the end of the topmost invoice group.

3) The Amount and Balance columns bear little obvious relation to each other. You cannot sum the individual Amounts to find the running Balance. The Balance seems to be accurate on each "invoice" line (as opposed to "payment" or "credit" lines), so perhaps only those Balance cells should be populated.

The individual invoice page is reasonable, and is much better than the top-level page.

For those who do not use Zipcar particularly often, these are probably minor annoyances at worst. But for those of us with a decent number of uses per month, things get out of hand pretty quickly. I don't even have a monthly fee stirring things up, since I anticipate my usage to be heavily seasonal. I can guess at some of the motivations for some of the design I see here, but in that case good intentions have significantly hindered usability.

-- Anonymous, June 30, 2004