My family's experience with Citywide RV was NOT a good one.
We chose Citywide for it's good "After Labor Day" rates for our family's first ever, 7 day vacation.
I spoke with Ray, the owner, on the phone twice, and all seemed well. We even set up an appointment to come out to see the RV. However when we went out for our appointment, he was not there - even though he knew when our appointment was. John, the man who seems to be in charge of maintnence, was there and he did a great job of showing us the RV that we would be taking out on our trip to Rapid City, South Dakota. There were, however, a few questions that John gave us different answers to than Ray had given me over the phone - but we chalked that up to "Well, maybe he doesn't know". There turned out to be more than one ocassion where Ray & John's stories DID NOT match up.
The major problems started before we even got on the road. As we were loading up, our RV started...well...chirping. Quietly, but it was a nusiance. Then the chirps turned into beeps. Very LOUD beeps. We finally figured out that it was coming from near the control box. Eventually (the next day) we figured out that the beeping was an indicator of battery issues. Yep, folks, BOTH RV batteries were shot. COMPLETELY. When I called Ray about it, he just said that he was "baffled" because the RV was supposed to have two new batteries. But, he assured me that the lights, water, generator, refrigerator, freezer, etc. would work just fine if it was plugged in to an electrical outlet. Really now. We had an entire day of driving across the entirety of South dakota, and we were NOT going to be hooked up to electricity for at least 15 hours, so somehow our food was just going to have to sit tight until the fridge got power from an electrical source. We ended up loosing about 80% of our food by the end of the trip.
The lack of batteries was a huge issue that caused other major issues, but then as our trip progressed, we began to find even more problems:
~The sewage hadn't been dumped, and the water hadn't been filled before we rented it - thus costing us more gas than we otherwise would've used
~the fuse box under the bed was extremely warm and buzzed really loudly
~the shocks on the RV were terrible, so we couldn't sleep in the back bedroom when the RV was in motion - way too bumpy!!
~No generator (because of the battery being out)
~the cupboards wouldn't stay shut
~everything rattled when we were on the road so it was super noisy, etc.
So much of our vacation time (at lease a day and a half worth) was spent trying to fix/deal with all of the issues that this RV presented. It DID NOT make for a good vacation and added so much stress to our time away.
I connected with Ray only once while we were on the road. The other times I and other members of my family called to report concerns (which was not too often as were were in an area with VERY spotty cell coverage), all he would say was that he was "baffled" about these things we had to deal with. I'm sorry, but "baffled" is an emotion, not a solution to our problem.
We finally decided to call John who seemed to know more about this RV than Ray did. He was very gracious and understanding, and said that he would pass all of our concerns on to Ray who would then call us back - which he never did.
When we finally did get back and return the RV, Ray was no where to be seen and John handled the return. (We had MORE problems with the RV by then! It just never ended...we even had to run the RV on our own gas for 2 hours while we unloaded on the night we got home, because there was no battery to turn on the inside lights.) John was as helpful as he could be, but there were things that only Ray could make the final decisions on.
At the time of writing (10.1.13) Ray has given us back our deposit, but there have been some other charges that got put on our bill that we were not aware of when we signed the contract. We are still trying to connect with him to get those matters solved.
This experience did not ruin our vacation, but it put a lot of undue stress and pressure on us and that made our time away FAR from pleasant. read more