Unraveling a $1,744 Mix-Up Over Rental Car Return

What happens, and who finally pays, when an auto dealer tells you he’ll turn in your rented car for you, but it doesn’t get returned for a month, and you are billed $1,744?

This did happen to Simonne Reynolds of Santa Monica, who would have owed $337 for the week’s rental, had she turned in the car herself, as planned. She paid the larger credit-card bill, but then she started trying to get the difference back.

It took her nearly four months. There was uncertainty over just who was responsible for the snafu, and Reynolds may have been contacting the wrong people at Budget Rent-A-Car. She fruitlessly went all the way to Budget Customer Relations in Carrollton, Texas.

But when I brought this matter to Budget’s general manager in the Inland Empire, Robert Compani, he acted in just four days to issue Reynolds a $1,407 credit.

So the answer might be that the rental car company pays. But Compani said he might go after the auto dealership--Santa Monica Lincoln-Mercury--which told Reynolds it would take care of returning her rented car, for at least a share of the cost.

At the same time, Compani said, there are indications that the station manager at Budget’s LAX facility, to which the car was supposed to be returned, got a message to pick up the car and didn’t follow through.

Lawyers I consulted had originally suggested the auto dealer was liable. They noted that it hadn’t persevered to see that the car was picked up.

Reynolds was driving to Palm Springs last Oct. 30 in her 10-year-old Oldsmobile when, near Riverside, the car began vibrating wildly and the right front wheel came off.

Fortunately, Reynolds was uninjured, but the car was wrecked. The Auto Club, her insurer, eventually totaled it and paid her off. But in the meantime, Reynolds rented a car, a Mercury Sable, from Budget Rent-A-Car’s Riverside office, continued on her way to Palm Springs and finally drove it back home.

She liked the Sable, and a week later she leased a new one from the Lincoln-Mercury dealer. On Nov. 7, when she went to pick it up, Reynolds said, salesman Robert Justin offered to take care of returning her rented car to Budget at LAX.

But on Dec. 1 Reynolds heard from Budget in Riverside. Did she want to keep the car any longer? she was asked.

“I called Justin and he said he had no idea where the car was,” Reynolds told me. “He said he’d called Budget and left a message to pick it up. Apparently, Budget never got the message and I guess everybody forgot about the car.”

The car finally got back to Riverside Dec. 6, and the battle then began over the bill.

By the time Reynolds contacted me March 8, she was despairing of any equitable result. She said she had persistently called Patrick Thomas, the general sales manager at Santa Monica Lincoln-Mercury, and Candy Oden, the station manager at Budget’s LAX facility, but that neither was calling her back.

I started by visiting Thomas. He said he intended to call Reynolds back as soon as he got through to someone at Budget who agreed to waive the part of the charge incurred while the car was sitting in the dealership’s storage yard.

Reasoning that it was the Riverside office of Budget--where the car was rented--rather than the LAX office that might be most interested in the matter, I called the manager there, June Jefferson Barnes.

She was quite forthcoming. She was able to confirm, for one thing, that the odometer showed that the car had not been driven by anyone from the dealership while it was out of Reynolds’ hands. The odometer reading was consistent with Reynolds’ estimate of how much she had driven the car while she had it.

Barnes hinted that Budget would eventually waive the charges, remarking, “We’re in the customer-service business.” But she referred me to her boss, Compani, over at Ontario International Airport.

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Meanwhile, I asked a trial lawyer I know, Bernie Bernheim, who he thought was liable in this matter.

“The woman [Reynolds] is on the hook in the first case,” he said. “She has signed the contract. She’s been billed. But she can seek indemnity from the dealer.

“He was adding into the lease deal a service of saving her the trouble of returning this car. He breached the oral contract, and he’s liable to her for what follows from the breach. Then the next question is, does the dealer have a claim against Budget. My opinion is, that’s the weakest claim.”

Two other attorneys I contacted agreed with Bernheim.

But by then Compani was saying he thought Budget would credit Reynolds for all charges incurred after the dealership took the car.

“It’s not worth it for us to go after the dealer,” he added at the time. “It would cost too much.”

I called Thomas at the dealership. Would he share the cost? I asked. “He’s welcome to go after me,” he replied. “We have all our records in this matter, and they show we called Budget at LAX.”

Thomas added that, in 25 years, he’s offered to return maybe 100 rented cars, and nothing had gone wrong before.

I’d told Compani I’d write this column Tuesday afternoon.

Shortly before, he called me. “I’ve spoken to Ms. Reynolds 10 minutes ago,” he said. “We came to an agreement that we would credit her $1,407.46.

“Maybe, this is not something I’m going to drop with the dealer, but in the meantime, I don’t want Ms. Reynolds to have to hold on.”

At the same time, however, Compani said, he’d been checking with Budget at LAX and found “they never did follow through on the message to pick up the car. So it shows someone was dropping the ball on our end. It sounds like Candy [Oden] just got busy.”

I tried to contact Oden. She wasn’t there when I went to Budget at LAX, but staff members said they’d give her my card. Someone gave me her card and when she didn’t call me, I called her line, and left a message. But she didn’t return the call.

Ken Reich can be contacted with your accounts of true consumer adventure at (213) 237-7060 or by e-mail at ken.reich@latimes.com.