Get with the programme

By N.B. | WASHINGTON, DC

HERTZ is America's largest car rental company, and it gets a lot of things right. Gulliver is a regular customer—I like the company's (nominally fee-based, but in practice free) Gold programme, which removes a lot of hassle. You give Hertz your information in advance, the company sends you an e-mail telling you how to pick up your car, and you can skip the counter and head right for the exit.

But this Friday, I had an extremely frustrating experience that exposes a broader problem with many firms that cater to business travellers. Despite the fact that we are on our phones constantly, a good number rental-car companies and airlines have mobile websites and apps that work poorly, if at all.

It would seem obvious that in today's world, a sharp mobile presence is essential. But Hertz's is especially poor—at least on Android (I haven't tested it on an iPhone). The app appears to be just the website run within a frame. If you back out of the app, to check your flight number in a browser, for example, you have to start all over again. Everything is highlighted in Hertz's iconic yellow, which makes it difficult to tell which fields are required or even how to move to the next step in the reservation process. There are tiny radio buttons that are hard to select. And you have to scroll through an immense list of airline names to enter your arrival information (see top picture). If you somehow make it to the end of the reservation process without quitting in frustration, you may well find you have missed a required field. But the error message that pops up doesn't tell you what you did wrong—at least, not in a way you can read (see bottom picture).

Hertz is not alone in having such a perfunctory approach to smartphones. But its seeming indifference is short-sighted. By 2017 it is expected that 30% of online travel-bookings by value will be made on mobiles. In many markets, Hertz is competing with web-native companies such as Uber and ZipCar. Producing something that its customers find pleasant to use feels like a no-brainer.