UKC

Car hire clever tricks.

We all know (or should do by now) to take photos of a rental car before and after (for that elusive "scratch" that costs £££ to repair...)
Many of us know to take our own free-standing "excess" insurance: annual policy for a fraction of the cost of the offered hard-sell policy at pick-up

The game has developped: watch for the "upgrade" which they "give" you and then charge you for.... (Yes, I got stung)

In reply to yorkshire_lad2:

question; with limited mileage (limited to say 250Km a day) do they just average it or can they tell ?

In reply to yorkshire_lad2:

I often hire a car for business (mostly in the US) and don't think I've ever yet been charged what we originally agreed if it's done on site (usually the airport). If it was my own money I would probably complain more than I do, and I never use the company concerned when I'm hiring for my own use.

In Europe and South Africa I generally use Europcar and pay in advance online. They are usually excellent. Only once has there been any problem and that was a 'the car's not clean enough' scam on Corsica. They calculate that you are in a hurry to catch your flight and will pay the 80 Euro (from memory) surcharge, rather than taking the car back to the nearest service station with a vacuum (which I did). They then tried to accuse me of a non-existent scratch that they couldn't even find when I demanded to see it...

In reply to yorkshire_lad2:


Yes - Hertz at Gatwick got me with this one a few weeks ago. Not as bad as Avis though, I paid for the 'absolutely everything covered' insurance and they still charged me £103 for a small scratch on an alloy wheel. I will never hire from Avis again!

In reply to Dave Garnett:

We discovered a deep scratch that had been touched up with paint after we gave our hire car a wipe down on arrival at our rental property in Corsica last year. We'd missed it on first inspection. We were a bit nervous of getting stung for someone else's subterfuge on returning the car to the airport. I went so far as to buy some polish to improve their botched repair and inspected it daily in the hope it would somehow merge into the paintwork. I'm pretty sure we threw some dust over the car shortly before arriving back at the airport to hide the mark.

It was with some trepidation that we faced the eagle eye of the hire company inspector. Instead, an 18 year old boy simply grabbed the key, checked the fuel, hopped into the car and gunned it across the lot and straight into the back of another car. We stopped worrying around this point!!