We had rented a car without navigator, because all of us had
good smartphones. There is one not-to-be-named brand selling smartphones with
offline navigation capability. That is an excellent feature the competitors
have not been able to offer. The plan was to use the offline navigation on our
way from Orlando via Cape Canaveral to Miami International Airport. We were
even half way when we arrived to Cape Canaveral with an empty battery. Seems
that they guys have still some development to do.
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| NASA Space Center at the Cape Canaveral |
Luckily we had also other mobile devices to use for the rest
of the journey. Another not-to-be-named brand offered maps in their tablet that
we can call “myPad”. However, no offline navigation and the device was not even
able to show the current location in the offline mode. That company has a lot of
development to do for their maps. Unfortunately another not-to-be-named famous
search company had not yet released their map on the previously mentioned
product. There we were driving dark roads towards Miami and my son was
following the map intersection by intersection and giving me navigation
guidance. Tedious job, but someone had to do it.
The next problem started when we were about 60 miles from
Miami. The signs indicated that the road tolls from this point towards Miami
operating only with prepaid systems like Sun Pass. I turned on the emergency
radio channel that was repeating the same story. I tried to call to Alamo car
rental service and Sun Pass service in order to activate the account, but no
answers in the middle of the night. I knew that there will be plenty of road
tolls before we would arrive at the airport and $100 fine for each of those did
not sound promising.
Luckily we had the perfect map reader who found us a direct
road through the cities. That was even shorter than the freeways. That’s the
way to go. Unluckily there were at least a hundred intersections between us and
the airport. Fortunately only half of those had read light, so the rest of the
journey was delayed "only" two hours.
We were really tired when we arrived at the airport. The guy
who was welcoming us at the rental car center confirmed immediately that all of
their rental cars have Sun Pass activated automatically. Why the hell did they
mention that two weeks ago.
Lessons learned
It takes only one person to spoil the image of your company.
There is still room for product development.
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| Straightest way to the airport - Unfortunately there were quite many traffic lights on the road |
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