Not Informed

Currently, I’m a little bit annoyed.

While I was returning the car to Avis the other day, I saw a little leaflet on their desk, talking about making a booking and getting Tesco Clubcard points for how much you spend with Avis. Having booked three lots of cars with them now, and having just spent £300+ on this one (although it’s on expenses, so it’s OK on that score) I was a bit narked to have lost those 300 points, plus t’others.

Now, I know that Clubcard and the like are cynical marketing ploys that allow the card owners (by which I mean ‘people who issued the cards’ as opposed to ‘people who carry the cards with them’) to track people, and target offers to those people with ever more efficiency and effectiveness (I wanted to type effectivity there, but I know it’s a made-up word) but at the same time, I don’t object hugely to them – and I allow my data to be used in that way.

(I used to do a clubcard swapping programme, so that their marketing data went to shit, but haven’t done that in a while – maybe I should restart. It always used to confuse them when a 30 year old man started buying tampons or whatever…)

Anyway, it annoyed me. Not because I’d missed out per se but because actually, it’d never been mentioned when I booked the cars – nothing on the site at all. You really had to search to find this page about it – and fortunately you can reclaim those points afterwards if you want to, by way of that same page but still, it’s just not a great promotion if no bugger knows about it…