“Free2Move left us with no way to get home”

photo (not related to the note below) by Cristina

“Dear PoPville,

I wanted to let people know about a terrible experience I had with a car sharing company recently, and I really hope no one’s experiencing anything similar this long weekend. A few weeks back, my boyfriend and I rented a Free2Move car for a weekend trip to Pennsylvania. We’ve done this a few times before, but this time around the car stopped working on our first night away. The company has customers use their app to unlock and start the car, and the car completely failed to connect to our phones even though we were in an open parking lot where we both had great signal. Free2Move was unable to unlock or start the car – or even locate it on their app – and proceeded to completely abandon us. They didn’t offer another car, wouldn’t pay for any other kind of way to get around or get home, and to this day have never even followed up to find out if we made it back to DC. We weren’t able to do anything on the trip other than spend our time on the phone with customer service, and walk along the highway to get food.

What made this harder was that we were in a fairly rural town where they didn’t have Lyft, Uber, or even a cab driver. We were really lucky there was a small Amtrak station nearby, and bought tickets back to DC when we realized Free2Move wasn’t offering any solutions. We actually had to run across a highway to a Pizza Hut to see if any delivery drivers would be willing to take us to the train station. (Thanks to those kind people and a wonderful woman at our hotel, we made it to the train.)

I’m so grateful I wasn’t alone and that we were able to get train tickets back, but it scares me to think about this happening to anyone in a place where it would be tough to find your way back home or you couldn’t afford another solution, because this company really does not care. We contacted customer service after getting back, and they sent us a bunch of auto-responses before closing the ticket without addressing any of what we had to say.”