Cabs on Call….or not. My daily rant.
I type this from the back of a taxi barreling its way to Cape Town airport. I’m not entirely sure why we’re barreling, though, because I’m going to miss my plane and there seems to be little point risking life and limb to shorten the four hour wait until the next flight. It’s still going to cost me over a thousand bucks and a lost day’s work.
But that’s okay because the warm smile and grovelling apology I got from Cabs on Call made it all alright. Not. More like a reprimand from the call centre. It’s my fault, apparantly, for being dumb enough to book a cab during rush hour, even though I’ve flown the same flight and booked a taxi for the same time at least monthly over the last year. Then there was the not even vaguely apologetic surly backwards glance from the driver when I got in.
Apart from the rush hour – which apparantly is such a new phenomenon it took everyone, including professional drivers, by surprise – I was also sarcastically reminded that my driver doesn’t have a helicopter. Nice. And they did, in fairness, send me an SMS round about the time I should have been getting into the taxi to say it would be 10 minutes late, That would have been ok, had it been 10 minutes, 30 minutes is in fact how late they were, which now means I’ll miss the plane.
Here’s the rant: if you puport to offer a service in a highly competitive market, then for God’s sake offer the frigging service. And do it well. And realise that customers will choose you when you take them by surprise by over-delivering, not leaving them anxious that you will deliver at all. Air travel is stressful enough without having to worry that some wheel clutching miserable sarcastic posse is going to pile extra stress on. I’m not trying to put the cab drivers out of business – my experience is that they are usually a friendly, affable, hard-working lot. But when some mouse jockey double books them or doesn’t give them enough time to get from A to B they need to quit the company and work for another one.
So next time you want to be grossly inconvenienced and made to feel like it was all your fault in the first place, use Cabs on Call in Cape Town. It’s exactly what you need.
PS I made the flight. But only because the SAA lady was so nice and my smile so charming. Then the flight was delayed. Then I was offered a free ticket if I agreed to be bumped to a later flight. Having prepared myself mentally to miss the flight anyway, I accepted and so now have a three hour wait. It’s that kind of day.
