The Worst Day of the Travel Year . . .

Getting to travel full-time means that we have more than our share of "best days" every year. But everyone that owns a diesel motor home also gets that one "worst day" each year. That is the day when you have to roll into one of those big diesel shops for the annual preventive maintenance. Our Tiffin motor home was built on a freightliner chassis, so we must find time in our fun travels to find a freightliner shop. 

It's always a stressful thing to find a good place to get the oil changed on our diesel engine. Preventive maintenance also includes things like changing the oil in the generator, changing the air filter, servicing the air dryer that runs the air-ride and air brakes system, etc. All this is necessary to keep our home running well. Mark spends a lot of time checking reviews and calling places. We settled on Doggett Freightliner in Pharr, Texas, this year for preventive maintenance. So our first day of traveling was only 17 miles long. It's not very far to Pharr, Texas.

We've had our annual maintenance done in six different Freightliner Shops all over the country--Tucson, Arizona; Gaffney, South Caroline; Missoula, Montana; Superior, Wisconsin; Idaho Falls, Idaho; and now Pharr, Texas. We would give some of those places stellar reviews, and others really bad reviews. We've spent a night or two at each one of those Freightliner service centers, camping in their parking lots. All of them had electric hook-ups and a safe place for motor home customers that live in their RVs. We planned to do the same here in Pharr as well. It was only after we were parked and settled in for the evening that we found out that they usually don't allow that. We didn't have any other option planned, so they let us stay--just this time.

It was a tight parking spot, and they had no option for electricity for us here at Doggett Freightliner. It might come in as our least photogenic camping spot ever, as they placed us between two wrecked truck tractors.

It's not only stressful to find a reputable place to get the diesel maintenance, it's also very expensive. These shops are used to working on truck tractor rigs, and we often think that they look at motor home owners as dumb old cash cows. After feeling like we were over-charged badly on our first year's maintenance, Mark now asks for an estimate on cost. It took several weeks and several phone calls, but he finally got the estimate. It seemed inflated with the number of hours to perform those oil changes and filter changes, and this year we were due for them to service the air dryer. We just hoped they worked faster than those inflated estimates when they actually pulled us into bay #15 at 9:15 a.m. We also take it as a good sign that we are not next door in unlucky #13.

We knew we had a boring day ahead of us, as they estimated 7.7 hours needed to perform all of our maintenance. At $110 per hour, we're hoping for a speedy mechanic. We settled into the stark customer lounge at Doggett. During the course of the day, we walked several laps around the property, keeping an eye on bay #15. Our mechanic took some time off for lunch, but he was back on the job until we saw him pull our home out of the bay at exactly 2:02 p.m. If you're keeping track, that's 4.75 hours after they came to get the motor home this morning.

Mark was then summoned to the cashier, where he didn't even get to see the itemized ticket before they expected him to pay. When he requested to see it, we noted that it's probably not a good sign when your receipt is three pages long. 

We found a few things wrong. The first problem was that the hourly fee was higher than $110--it seems it had just gone up this week!?!. The second problem was that even though the motor home was only in bay #15 for 4.75 hours (and that included time for our mechanic's lunch), we were charged for 7.7 hours!

The shop manager tried to convince us that they used some kind of "industry standard" to charge a standard hourly amount for preventive maintenance. His point was that mechanics would be cheated for being fast workers if they charged $110 only for the hours that they worked. Does that make any sense? So they would rather cheat the paying customers! Over and over we found excessive labor charges on that receipt. They charged two hours labor for changing the oil on our little generator! When reviewing our past receipts we see that in all the other years' receipts we were charged 30-45 minutes labor for the generators. But never two hours! 

Mark had already checked the air dryer's manufacturer's web site, where they estimated that it should take 0.8 hour to do the service on the air dryer. Doggett's "standard charge" for air dryer service is 3.2 hours. We just got madder as we looked at that receipt! 

As we loaded up and headed down the road, we definitely felt ripped off by Doggett Freightliner. We can't recommend them, and we hope we never have to go back to them for anything. This day of preventative motor home maintenance has lived up to its billing--it was an expensive worst day of the travel year.