REPAIR

Would you rent a car from this company?

cancun roadYou don’t have to read this site every day to know that fraudulent car rental damages are a big problem, at least as far as customers are concerned. If you’re a car rental agency, you might call it something different, ranging from “no problem” to “profit center.”

But at least one car rental company says it’s on our side. It’s Bandago, a San Francisco company that specializes in van rentals. After I wrote a story about the problem of fraudulent claims for Auto Rental News, a trade magazine, last year, I got an unexpected call from its CEO, Sharky Laguana.
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147 comments

Don’t get broadsided by the car rental industry’s double standards

Vladitto/Shutterstock
Vladitto/Shutterstock

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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74 comments

The car rental industry’s day of reckoning may be close

Ilya Alkishin/Shutterstock
The car rental industry is in trouble. And this time, it can’t be fixed by quietly settling out of court with its customers or lobbying a few state lawmakers.

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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39 comments

Argh! This damaged freezer is making me come unhinged

Photo by stevendepolo/Flickr Creative Commons
Question: My husband and I ordered an upright freezer from Sears. The delivery driver bounced it off of a wall in the basement and now it has a large dent in the side. The driver was concerned, and he said that he would try to help us. I assume he did this so we would accept the unit, and he wouldn’t have to carry it back up the steps.
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38 comments