Been a VA for about a year now (3 years total in the car rental industry), and I just need to vent and get some perspective from people who’ve been in this space longer.
I currently have 3 part time clients, all same timezone. Clients 1 and 2 are honestly fine mostly focused on car rental tasks, a few extra things here and there but still manageable.
Client 3 is where things get messy.
When I applied, the role was supposed to be mostly admin work on a specific platform. But over time, it turned into… basically everything. I’m handling reservations, payments, receivables tracking, customer follow-ups, claims, inquiries, coordinating with different parties parang lahat na. I didn’t mind at first because I wanted to learn more, but lately it’s just been too much.
For context, this client used to have around 60 vehicles but now down to less than 20. The system is super unstructured: • We have our own system but still manually create reservations
• Rates are supposed to be fixed per car, but he constantly gives discounts or changes pricing per guest
• Long-term clients extend daily, so we have to encode everything one by one
• No automation at all, so data ends up inconsistent
• End of month = manual tracking of all earnings from scratch
On top of that, sometimes he rents out cars without informing us, then gets upset when the data doesn’t match or shows gaps like we’re supposed to magically know every transaction.
Now I’m also handling payments, tracking receivables, chasing clients, filing claims, dealing with concerns… basically operations + admin + finance all in one. And I’m being paid $4/hour.
What really pushed me today: he wants me to cross-check ALL reservations from January against bank transactions. I already told him the records aren’t accurate to begin with (because bookings aren’t always logged properly + inconsistent pricing), but he still expects a clean reconciliation. And whenever I ask for clarification, he gets annoyed.
I don’t mind hard work, but this just feels like I’m being set up to fail because the system itself is broken.
At this point I’m just really questioning if the pay is even worth the stress. Anyone else been in a similar situation? How did you handle it?