A little story about Apollo and how it ruined what should have been an amazing road trip in New Zealand.

In today’s world, customer service plays an important role however that is not something Apollo possesses. It all started with the first encounter at the Apollo office in Auckland. We were 10 minutes late - which is of course our own fault. We did not see that the pick up is before 4 pm and not 4:30 pm which is the opening hours. We apologised, however we were greeted with the most arrogant and annoyed employee. Also, we needed to pay 75 ND because of the 10 minutes delay - which is an absolutely crazy amount of money for 10 minutes. How can that ever make sense?

The pick-up took almost an hour because the Apollo people couldn’t figure out their own system. The employee who handled the case was so pissed at us, however we just had an email from another employee with a lower price than what her system said. She sweared at us, rolled her eyes at us and dropped my card 2 times because she was so annoyed of us.

When they finally figured it out, we were almost kicked out of the office because they needed to close NOW. This resulted in that we didn’t get any instruction in how the interior of the car worked.

So, after this terrible and shocking experience we drove away only to discover that the bottom bed was broken. This was a Friday - the next morning, we called Apollo to tell them that we couldn’t sleep in the car, however we were just told that because it was weekend they couldn’t get a mechanic until Monday....

Alright so, we got 75 NZ in total (for 4 people) to sleep another place until Monday. However, the cheapest hostel we could find was way over 75 NZ pr night, obviously. So now we have payed an amount for sleeping at a hostel and also payed to sleep in the car.

The saddest thing is though that we had planned to drive further south in the weekend - so we both lost a lot of money, time and experiences we now have to skip.

Reviewed almost 6 years ago