Orlando Valero Pérez
Agente de Rentas
Mérida, Venezuela

OK, good evening, my name is Orlando Valero Pérez. Currently I am working in the capacity of a rental agent. Specifically in the state of Mérida at station 784. Specifically the job of a rental agent is nothing more than the drawing up and closing of car rental and car leasing contracts, which is the product that the company sells as such. One understands, obviously, that special attention towards the clients or towards the public in general should always exist.

Among the assignments that are carried out here, the most important, as I said previously, is the drawing up and closing of contracts, verifying the same, right? soliciting the required information to draw up the contract, such as their credit card, identification card, and a current driver's license, both for a Venezuelan as well as foreigners, in the case of foreigners, their passport, right?, and see that everything is up to date.

Once all those documents have been checked you can draw up the contract, right? You take care of that and then file it all away, right?, and they are kept on file. These records are transcribed, the data of the contracts, to the computer to keep track of it all, right? and there is a file of the data for each client. The rest deals with office work in general, such as keeping up the books, right? and normal operations of any office.

The second question says, describe in detail the activities of a typical day of work. A typical day of work is simply a shift that goes from eight to twelve and from two to six, or any other schedule that is assigned by the company, depending on the amount of work that they have.

First off we open in the morning both in the office as well as at whatever station you are assigned to work at. You get out all the contracts that are for that day and you check out all the vehicles that are going to be rented out during the day to see that they are properly equipped, right, full of gasoline most of all, so that you can provide a good service to the customer, have excellent maintenance to be able to serve them.

In relation to describing my experience of work with foreigners, many of the people who request our services are foreigners. As for me, I can say that there are different types of people and different types of foreigners. I believe that all people are the same and I believe that in the case of foreigners it depends on their culture. Specifically I can illustrate this with an example. One of the experiences would be the following Once I was working at the airport station and some people from France came up and they had a reservation to rent a vehicle here in Mérida and a problem came up because they had a fare described on a piece of paper that let's say was something around 2,100 bolívares per day, a fare that by looking at the amounts and fares and costs that we have in the company, just didn't balance out at all. We tried to solve the problem for the client, and the total still went over, let's say 5 bolívares, but the client wouldn't accepted this at all. We lowered it for them, that is, instead of two thousand one hundred, it was two thousand fifty and they still didn't accept it, that is, for some laughable amount of five or twenty bolívares the client got upset. In the end the manager had to intervene right? and spent half an hour explaining it to them. Finally they understood why there was no other way and why they had to accept it for heaven's sake. To not go on too long, let's stop at this point.