Car Rental Turnoffs, Hidden Fees

Recently I needed to rent a car. I called Hertz and made a reservation. The price quoted seemed fair. I rented the car and returned it the next day, dropping my rental agreement in the appropriate slot.

But when I got my bill a few days later, it was roughly $11 more than I had been quoted. The reason? Sales tax and gasoline charges.

Under the circumstances, I felt that I got off easy.

Renting a car these days can be a lot more expensive than you think, despite all the advertised discounts. And if you don’t shop and compare rental prices, restrictions and extra, not-often-mentioned charges, you could be in for a rough ride when the bill comes.

To be sure, there are dozens of great discounts offered by rental car companies. Most rental company rate books resemble the telephone directory in size. In fact, so many supposed discounts are available to so many people that the likelihood of qualifying for a rental car discount is great. If you belong to an auto club, credit union or airline frequent flyer program you probably already qualify for a discount.

But to receive truly substantial discounts, you have to do a little more advance work. Rental car companies do offer these large discounts, but more often than not they require a reservation.

Quite a Feat

In New York, for example, trying to rent a car for a weekend and qualify for the advertised weekend rate is quite a feat. Rental companies, like airlines, limit availability of discount cars. If you’re not careful, you could easily spend the equivalent of a down payment for a new car by trying to rent one for the weekend at the last minute.

It’s even worse in Europe.

If you suddenly get the urge to rent a car in France, try to re-evaluate your impulse.

Last fall a California couple rented a Ford Taurus from Hertz at 10 in the morning for a one-day excursion through the countryside around Strasbourg.

They drove the car 174 miles, returning it at 5 p.m. the same day. The cost: a staggering $244.96.

What the couple didn’t realize was that they were paying a full rate for the car (no reservation), a hefty charge of more than 3 French francs per kilometer and, last but not least, there’s the almost criminal tax of 33.33% imposed by the French government.

Were the charges correct? They were, Hertz confirmed. If the couple had only made a reservation under the company’s “Affordable Europe” summer program, they could have rented a Ford Fiesta in France at a weekly rate of $159 to $186 and paid nothing for mileage.

In the United States there are similar problems, like the touchy subject of drop-off charges. These add-on charges for renting a car in one location and dropping it off in another not only can be, but usually are, excessive.

One-Way Surcharges

Often these one-way surcharges can run as high as $75 per rental, and higher. A few years ago National Car Rental began their aggressive advertising campaign which is still going on, announcing that it had eliminated the dreaded drop-off charge, and that customers driving rented cars from one location to another would probably only be charged a $10-a-day fee instead of a drop-off charge.

This semantic mumbo-jumbo amounts to the same thing. At $10 a day, a rental of six days would cost an additional $60. It sounds like a drop-off charge to me.

On even a one-day rental between locations, National can be expensive. For example, if you rent a mid-size car (a Buick Skylark or Chevrolet Citation) in Chicago and want to drive it to Milwaukee, National will charge you $60 a day ($50 a day for the car, $10 a day for the privilege of driving it to Milwaukee) and throw in 100 free miles a day.

If you rent a compact car from them (a Chevrolet Cavalier or Pontiac J-2000) for the same destination, don’t expect any discounts. The rate: $59 a day.

Renting a mid-size car from National to drive a one-day trip between Los Angeles and San Francisco will cost you $67.

The rates quoted are non-discounted, regular rental rates. But what if you’re eligible for a corporate or group discount?

With National, you may end up with no discount at all if you want to drop off the car. One corporation, which normally rents its cars from National at $33 a day with unlimited mileage, would lose the free mileage if the car is dropped off at another location. The new rate would be $33 a day and a staggering 33 cents a mile. You don’t need to be a mathematical genius to discover that the same one-day trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco could easily run $113, not counting insurance charges or gasoline.

End of Free Ride

In fact, when it comes to mileage charges, the end of the free ride is at hand. Citing increased operating and insurance costs, most rental car companies are moving quickly to put caps on free mileage offers.

A typical 1986 rental includes an average of 125 free miles a day. But even if you escape by driving under the number of allotted free miles, then comes the often painful subject of gasoline charges. Many rental car chains rent their cars with full tanks of gas, and expect them to be full when you return the car.

More often than not, because most car renters (especially business travelers) don’t have the time to fill up their rental cars or don’t want to be burdened with additional receipts, the cars are returned with less than full tanks.

The resulting excessive rental car refueling charges represent one of the largest areas for rental car price abuses.

At Los Angeles International Airport, Hertz charges an outrageous $1.75 a gallon to refill your tank. Avis will hit you for $1.78 a gallon if you’re renting in Chicago. The gas bill jumps to $1.80 a gallon for cars returned to Avis’ Detroit Metropolitan Airport facility.

Refueling Charges

And even if you buy the gas yourself and fill up the tank before you return the car, it may still result in some refueling charges. Some rental car company locations are known to top off gas tanks of returned cars, even if the gas gauges register full.

But the gas charge rip-offs are not always as simple as this. At least one rental car chain practices something that could be interpreted as nothing less than a reverse gas fill-up scheme.

For example, if you want to rent an inexpensive car from Alamo they’ll rent you one, a two-door Chevy Chevette, for as little as $19.99 a day and throw in unlimited free mileage.

It sounds good. But when you go to rent the car, you learn one additional fact conveniently omitted from the price quote.

In addition to possible insurance charges, the Alamo rental clerk will then tell you that you will be charged $9.99 for gasoline at the time you rent the car. The company promises that it will rent you the car with half a tank of gas in it, and encourages you to bring it back as close to empty as you can.

Count the Ways

There are just a few ways this benefits the company and not you. First is the cost of the gas. A Chevy Chevette holds 12 1/2 gallons of gas when the tank is full. Half a tank at $9.99 means that you’re paying nearly $1.60 a gallon before you even start the engine.

Second, if you do any driving at all you’re going to need to buy more gas, and unless you are an especially good trip planner, chances are that you won’t be returning the car with the gas gauge resting on empty. What’s worse is that you will be subsidizing Alamo’s gas costs on its next rental, for which the company will also receive $9.99 up front.

“There are overcharges in the rental car business everywhere,” says Jan Heffington, president of the JBH Co. in Redondo Beach. Heffington should know. For five years she worked for Hertz and was regional sales manager for the company in Chicago.

It could be argued that Heffington is one of the people car rental companies like the least. Her company does a brisk business in auditing rental car invoices, looking for overcharges and errors.

Her corporate clients (TRW, Northrop and Rockwell, to name a few) regularly send Heffington their paid rental car contracts. JBH audits them, and challenges inappropriate charges. Heffington then splits the savings with the companies.

“We have one customer,” she reports, “who has been overcharged $250,000 because the special discount rate that this company was given in several cities is actually higher on about 30% of their rentals than the regular time and mileage rate that they could have had.

Denied Monthly Rate

“We also have the classic cases,” she says, “where a monthly discount rate has been denied because the customer rented the car for only 29 days.”

Heffington offers the following advice to protect yourself when renting a car:

--Always ask the reservation clerk to repeat back to you the prices quoted, car model types and any restrictions.

--Be very specific about where you want to return the car, even if it’s within the same city where you rented it. Expensive drop-off charges can sometimes apply at different locations within the same city.

--Then, always ask for an identification or computer confirmation or locater number. You may hang up your phone convinced that you have a rental car reservation in Ohio, but without that confirmation number, the clerk at the Toledo airport rental car counter might treat you like an unwanted alien, especially if they’ve run out of cars and can’t find your reservation by name.

--When asking for a discount, remember that there are dozens of different discounts for different organizations. For example, if you work for a major corporation, chances are that you can get the corporate rate even if you’re on vacation.

--At many airport locations, some major rental car firms offer their clients the convenience of express check-in service, whereby the customer returns the rental car, records out the vehicle’s mileage, gas level, time of return and drops the completed rental agreement into a slot, thus avoiding possible long return lines.

“Sure, it’s convenient,” Heffington says, “but we feel these express services have been a major cause of billing errors. Customers often don’t discover any overcharges until after they get the bill. And by then it’s either too late or too time-consuming to fight the charges.”