How would you rate your AAA Auto Club service?

For years I’ve been singing the praises of Automobile Club of Southern California (AAA) membership, especially for frequent travelers. The 10% hotel discounts are helpful, especially if you’re not a senior or a military family. And the roadside emergency service has always been the deal clincher. Up to four tows or jump-starts per year? For a $20 joining fee and $47 yearly membership fee? It’s always been a slam dunk, and the promised service has always been there. And that’s why I’m perplexed now.

About 7 p.m. on Monday, March 24, my wife’s car started behaving strangely, so I called for roadside help from a mini-mall in La Cañada Flintridge…and waited, and waited. Though the Auto Club’s operators typically promise service within half an hour, we waited an hour without luck until I got fed up, canceled the request and solved the problem another way.

Then on Saturday night, April 12, about 10 p.m., I had a blow-out while heading south on I-5 in southern Oceanside. From the shoulder of the freeway (under a sign that said I was two miles north of Carlsbad), I called, gave my position and was promised help within 25 minutes. Didn’t happen. I called again, and found that responsibility was being handed from a first tow company to a second.

Have you asked for roadside help through the Auto Club of Southern California in the last year and, if so, how did it work out?

All the while, as my hazard lights blinked, traffic zoomed past a few feet away as my daughter slumbered in her child-safety seat. Finally, an hour after my first call, a tow-truck driver arrived and did great, quick tire changing — once his big truck was parked behind, I felt a lot better about hopping out and extracting the spare, etc. Soon we were on our way.

But I’ve never had two straight instances of such slow service, especially so close together. I’m hoping that this is just my bad luck (double-bad luck, really). But I also wonder, Southern California travelers: Have you asked for roadside help through the Auto Club of Southern California in the last year? How did it work out?

The Auto Club of Southern California, a not-for-profit service organization, covers the 13 southernmost counties of California (Kern being the northernmost). It claims about 6 million members. Like its siblings around the country, it relies on a network of legions of affiliated individual tow companies and garages.

I’ve asked a spokesman how many companies are signed on to help with this service, and how that number compares with a few years ago. Here’s the auto club’s answer, with a healthy serving of further statistics thrown in.

First, the Auto Club got 4.5 million calls for emergency road service in 2006, which increased to 4.8 million in 2007. To handle all these calls, the club had 356 contract stations in 2004, a figure that has grown to 407 stations now.

The average response time is 21.5 minutes. (All of these figures come from Auto Club spokesman Jeffrey Spring.)

As part of ongoing member-satisfaction surveying, the club hired an independent company to survey 24,000 members in 2007 to rate their satisfaction with roadside service on a 1-5 scale, with 5 being the highest. More than 85% said 5, Spring reported, and more than 95% said 4 or 5.

Bottom line from club headquarters: “The call [results] you got, unfortunately, did not go the way we want them to, but that’s not the norm,” Spring said.

So apparently I was double-unlucky twice in three weeks. And you?

— Christopher Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

[Image: Southern California Automobile Club website]

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 15, 2008 at 3:21 pm by Christopher Reynolds and is filed under Angry Traveler, Business Travel, Los Angeles, News, Tips & Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.