What Was Your Worst Valet Experience?

In theory, leaving your car with the valet shouldn’t be that big of a deal. You hand over your keys in exchange for a ticket, someone who probably parks 100 different vehicles a night moves your car for you, and when you’re ready to leave, you hand over your ticket, and they bring your car back to you. Even if your car has a manual transmission, valets should know how to drive stick. And if it’s fancy and expensive, well, odds are, they’re used to parking cars that are even fancier and more expensive. 

Besides, it’s not like 99.999% of cars are all that difficult to drive. Figuring out how to put a modern automatic into drive is usually the hardest part, and even that isn’t especially difficult if you’ve driven more than a handful of them. And it’s not like they’re actually driving your car anyway. They’re just moving it from the front of the hotel or restaurant to the parking lot or garage. Easy peasy.

And yet, that isn’t necessarily what happens. At least not every single time. Sometimes people make mistakes. Other times, they do something stupid, and it comes back to bite them. Sometimes the thrill of getting the chance to take a sports car for a little joyride proves to be too much for the valet to resist. Other times, that valet who needed to know how to drive stick in order to get the job definitely never learned. Heck, they may just not be used to driving something so low, forcing you to watch in horror as they mangle your splitter pulling up. 

Since I almost never valet cars except on press trips, my experiences have all been positive, but something tells me plenty of you haven’t been so lucky. If that’s the case, we want to hear about it. Share your valet horror story down in the comments, and we’ll pick some of the worst ones for Thursday’s Answers of the Day. No one actually wins when we’re comparing disastrous experiences, but maybe letting out a little frustration will be cathartic.