Beyond my notebook, there was one other glitch in our trip - our friends came down with the wrong credit card - an expired Capitol One card instead of the new one. That's when the "What's in your wallet" marketing campaign started to ring false. I'll let Mike continue:

I get down here to Florida and find that we had a minor problem with our primary credit card and need to use the backup Capitol One card. I looked at the expiration date and noticed it expired about a year ago. I called Capitol One to see if they could send a copy of the card to the resort I'm staying at. This is when I learned that Capitol One DOES SAY NO! (If you don't know what I'm referring to, you haven't seen the David Spade commercials from the past couple years.

The first NO was "Could you Fedex me a copy of my card?". NO, WE DON'T USE FEDEX. Okay, the informed me that they use UPS so I wasn't too upset. I asked if they could UPS it down and they said YES, YOU'LL GET IT FRIDAY. This was MONDAY when I called so FRIDAY wasn't that convenient. I asked if it could be UPS'ed overnight. NO! WE ONLY SEND IT FOUR-DAY. I said I'd pay but they claimed it was undoable.

My last grumble wasn't a NO per se but when asked where to send it, I said I was staying in a particular resort in Disney World. They told me they needed a full address. I had to have Joanne call the registration desk on the other phone line and we played a real game of telephone passing the address to Capitol One. If Capitol One's service was up to par with that of Disney's, I'm sure I'd only have to give the resort name and look everything up.

Capitol One mocks other companies for having bad customer service but after this experience, I really appears to me that the pot is calling that old kettle black.

If you make a strong claim in your (ubiquitous) advertising, it's a really, really bad idea to have your customer service not live up to that claim. It's worse than making no promises and having second rate service - because you leave a doubly bad taste in your customer's mouth. I can tell you this much - I don't think I'd accept one of their cards after this.