Shuttle not always so Super

I have been a fan of the Super Shuttle service (http://www.supershuttle.com) for quite a while. They provide airport transportation at many airports in the United States and a few in Europe for not much more than half the cost of a taxi. You usually share the trip with a few other passengers, so the trip takes a little longer than it would by taxi. Still, I mostly find the savings are worth it.

Or at least I did until a recent evening when I got a driver who admitted he had been on the job for just two days, and who seemed to have no idea of where he was going. He was using a GPS system, but it didn't seem to work very well, and he had no backup plan. He had great difficulty finding a certain hotel, and ended up asking a taxi driver where it was. Luckily the driver took pity on him and told him, or we might still be driving around in circles. The concept of a map appeared to be foreign to my driver.

He was a very pleasant older man, and while I wanted to tell him perhaps he should seek other employment, I wimped out and didn't do so. A trip that normally takes 40 minutes or so ended up taking nearly two hours, and for all I know this driver is still out there costing other travellers large amounts of time. However, jobs are hard to come by in the area where I was, so I didn't want to report him to the company. I hope he has learned on the job, or at least purchased a map.

This was an object lesson in how saving money may cost you a lot of time.