Have you heard the joke about the lady who gets a sneak preview of heaven, gets showed around, loves it, and then when she dies and goes to heaven, finds it to be a wretched place? When she asked what happened to the place, she was told, ‘Ah, well, before you were a prospect, now you’re a customer.’

I thought this practice of ‘offer only available to new customers’ – ie up yours to current customers – was dying out. If it is, no-one has told the internet-based car hire aggregator I’ve used every month for the last 15 months or so. They were happy to email me regularly with special offers that weren’t all that special, but at no time did they invite me to register with them for additional discounts. You would have thought that after booking with them – giving my email address – that they would want to further bind me in with genuinely good offers, but no.

Their reservation process failed me recently, so I went online to use the help and chat areas, and also to search for my reservation, of which there was no record. It was then that I saw I could actually register with them to manage my bookings. Once done, I discovered that I could have earned significant discounts after a certain number of reservations that I had passed months ago.

You can’t tell me that it escaped their notice that I had made a bunch of bookings and would appreciate a reward for my loyalty, thereby further endearing me to them.

They didn’t, I would have, so now I’ll try someone else. They’ve had their one chance.