Don’t Waste Your Money: How to avoid getting billed for rental car damage you didn’t cause
(WHTM)– Planning to rent a car during your spring or summer travel this year? We have a caution so that you don’t get billed for damage you didn’t cause.
Butch Hatcher is a clean car fanatic, who loves shining his BMW.
“This here is a 2003,” Hatcher said.
So imagine his surprise when a rental car company charged him hundreds in cleaning fees!
“They charged me $300 for a clean-up,” Hatcher said.
But the cleaning fee was only one surprise, Butch’s receipt showed a late fee of $140 a day for a week even though he insists he had returned the car!
“They said I didn’t turn it in,” Hatcher said. “They said their records show the car wasn’t turned until a week later.”
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Turns out he dropped the car off after hours.
“I called customer service and told them I dropped it out front and put the key under the passenger side seat,” Hatcher said.
Now a national consumer group says is getting complaints from all over the country, from renters who say they turned in a rental car in pristine condition, but a few days later they got a bill for cleaning or damage.
“Car rental companies do like to broadside customers with bills like this,” the founder of the consumer advocacy group “The Elliott Report,” Chris Elliott said. “There’s no one there, you just drop the key off. Guess what? That’s still your responsibility.”
The Elliott report says to protect yourself, take cell phone photos of the rental car so they can’t claim you damaged it.
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“Take pictures that show the rental car before, and take pictures afterward as well,” Elliott said.
Elliott says you can never take too many pictures of a rental car and he says then save them for six months just in case. Hatcher says he will never drop off a rental again if there is no one there to check it out personally.
So try to avoid overnight drop-off and take and save pictures of the car, so you don’t waste your money.
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