Rental Car Nightmares
A couple of weeks ago, I rented a car at National car rental. My sister returned it for me, and I got a shock in my email a few weeks later.
I immediate assumed this had to be a scam, or some sort of mistake. But the more I read, the more that I could tell this was actually legit. They had the right time, the right place and right company. They were charging me for $1295.81 for damages to the vehicle.
Looking at this deeper I noticed that the line items were VERY extensive, replaces door parts and handles. According to them, the car was HEAVILY damaged.
Looking at the pictures, I could barely see any of the damages they were indicating. It almost felt like they were offloading the cost of wear and tear on me.
Obviously I was LIVID.
- I knew that there were some small marks on the car when I picked it up, but I never took any pictures.
- I knew that no damage whatsoever happened when I had the car. I didn’t think any of this damage was on the car when I picked it up, but the damage in the photos are so subtle its hard for me to be sure.
- I had rental insurance specifically for this car, but didn’t want to file a claim for something I didn’t do.
- My sister had someone walk around the car and CONFIRM it was ok before she returned it. They parked it, and who knows what happened after that.
- National has a service for their “Emerald Isle” premium members where you can pick up and drop off a car without ever seeing someone.
- This now seemed like a LIABILITY not a PERK since now I can’t get them to acknowledge damage on the car.
- I’m a new member and if they were going to be f*cking sticklers about this whole thing, they should have EXPLAINED it to me. I would have got them to sign off on EVERY F*CKING SCRATCH BEFORE AND AFTER returning the car.
So I went to chase down this problem:
- I called National Support, and they told me that I needed to call their damage unit. I asked them to make a note on my case so I wouldn’t have to repeat myself.
- After I called their damage unit, they redirected me to someone else.
- After getting to another person, they redirected me to someone else.
- The last person seemed to know what they were talking about, but I had repeat myself because she could not access any of the notes that National Support wrote down.
The last woman who oversaw the appeals to the damages told me the following information:
- Generally its better if you take photos beforehand, however, in situations where the “damage” is so small it is easy to miss, you can appeal and they will dismiss it. They consider it human error.
- She told me that my “damages” were definitely small enough that someone might have missed it before (so it may not be caused by me).
- She agreed to waive all of the fees.
So my lessons learned from this whole experience:
- Always get rental car insurance just in case.
- Take a video when you pick up the car to prove the condition of the car beforehand. (It’s gonna be me in the parking lot being like “hey this is me in the parking lot picking up this car at X time” so they have proof I didn’t take the video at some other place or time)
- Take a video of the car when you return it.
- If they try to charge you for something really small and not visible in your videos, appeal, and they will probably dismiss it.
- It’s good to be a mix of legitimately angry (I was furious) but polite at the same time (I apologized in advance telling them I was very upset but I knew it wasn’t their fault personally). As a result, they were helpful and resolved my issue quickly.
A day later I got an email.
