This week, I’m resuming my Elliott’s List feature by asking you to vote on your the car company you prefer when you travel. Which agency offers the best service and prices and stands behind its products without dinging you for unwanted insurance or damage claims? In other words, which one do you turn to when you need a set of wheels?
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It didn’t.
“When I arrived in Israel I was advised that Hertz had a mandatory insurance,” he says. “The insurance was $29 per day — twice as much as the car rental. At no time did Expedia advise me of these charges and at no time was I given an opportunity to shop around.”
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Ric Vesely knows about the car rental industry’s double standards. When he returned his Dollar Rent a Car vehicle in Minneapolis recently, an employee asked him a strange question: Did he have a receipt for his gasoline purchase?
Vesely, an engineer who was visiting from Colorado, hadn’t bought Dollar’s pricey fuel-purchase option, agreeing instead to return the vehicle with a full tank. He said he didn’t have a receipt, but that it didn’t matter — the needle on the gas gauge pointed to “full.”
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Something about the $667 repair bill that Enterprise Rent-a-Car recently sent Jerry Bitting looked suspicious to him.
For starters, the car didn’t appear to be the one that Bitting, an account executive for a federal agency in Washington, had rented. The dates when the damage occured didn’t match the dates on which he’d driven the Mazda 3. The pictures were taken weeks after he’d returned the car. And questions to Enterprise’s damage recovery unit, asking for an explanation of the inconsistencies, were met with silence.
“I told them that the damages were not there when I picked up the car or dropped it off,” Bitting says.
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Maybe you’ve seen the recent TV report about the allegedly bogus damage claims filed by Budget against its customers in Canada. You’ve probably said to yourself, “A-ha! I knew they were doing that!
So are a lot of other people.
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Not a day seems to go by that I don’t hear from an angry car rental customer — folks like Craig Solomon, who rented a car in England from Avis for two weeks recently.
“Toward the end of the rental one of the tires blew out,” he says. “It ultimately cost about $500 to replace, and Avis has been unwilling to date to accept the responsibility.”
The way Solomon sees it, Avis should have rented him a car with good tires. He wasn’t taking the vehicle off-roading, and had driven it safely and never gotten so much as a parking ticket.
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Allen Friedman says he declined the optional insurance when he rented a Chevrolet Impala from Dollar Rent a Car at Denver International Airport recently.
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