It’s one thing to centralise your web site to a global location for efficiency, but how about a little customisation to allow for different countries. For instance, how many global web sites get you to search a location database, and come up with state names which are two characters, because the US programmers didn’t factor in that other countries would use anything else, and the local operations are too lazy to insist on it being fixed?

This was from Avis, looking for Australian offices. Hertz did the same. Budget didn’t. I’m almost amazed the postcodes didn’t have an extra leading zero.

At least this one has managed to avoid displaying the phone numbers as (xxx) xxx xxxx when it should be (xx) xxxx xxxx (like my old answering machine used to). Chucking the extra 0 after the 61 wasn’t particularly helpful though, as use one or the other depending on where you are… never both. Not unusual though.

Reminds me of an email exchange I had with CitySearch when they first launched in Australia, asking them why they were showing event dates in mm/dd/yyyy format. Sure enough, it was because they’d got the software from the US, and hadn’t figured out how to change it yet. Pretty shoddy.