SOPHIE ELSWORTH

Hiring a car comes with plenty of additional fees and charges on top of the basic rental rate. Picture: Getty Images PERSONAL FINANCE WRITER WANT to get taken for a ride? It’s pretty simple: hire a car.

I am astounded vehicle hire companies can still manage to get away with charging customers so many irritating fees and charges.

When you go to hire a car, up pops the daily hire car cost, which looks reasonable until all the other additional charges are chucked in.

I had a few days away interstate this month and hired a car from an airport.

Big mistake, which I’ll explain shortly.

I examined all the nasty little charges that pushed up the car hire cost from $72.34 for four days (basic rental charges and kilometres travelled) to $226.56. This is how Europcar and the insurer stung me. ●

Premium Location Surcharge of 25 per cent:

Yep, you read correctly.

I got stung an extra 25 per cent when I hired the car from a supposed “premium location”, which is usually airports and train stations.

This is the heftiest of all the extra charges. If you’re picking up the car from somewhere convenient you’ll pay the price. ●

Payment card fee of 1.32 per cent:

This is the charge for paying using a credit card and one Europcar has gotten into strife over.

The consumer cop, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, last year forced the company to front up to the Federal Court for charging customers excessive surcharges on card payments. This was after the company increased surcharges from 1 per cent to 1.43 per cent.

The ACCC said this was above the actual cost of processing the payments.

And, consequently, just last month Europcar was ordered to cough up $350,000 in penalties for slugging customers excessive credit and debit card payments.

Despite the amount being relatively small per customer – about $1 each – this quickly adds up when you charge tens of thousands of customers.

But when I contacted Europcar while writing about their fees and charges, they said this fee was in line with their current cost of card acceptance. In other words, cop it on the chin, love. ●

Vehicle registration recovery fee:

The cost of registration and licensing of the vehicle I used. Enter a charge of $6.75 per day. ● Yep, yet another fee. This time a charge of 3.5 per cent.

This is the cost of the company handling my paperwork to sort the car hire. ● Enter basic excess insurance – the cost to bring your excess down from $5000 to $500 in case you end up in a prang. That’s another $97.39 for four days’ cover.

In total, I paid $226.56 for four days of car hire.

A good way to irritate customers is by charging them a handful of fees and charges, which is exactly what the car hire industry does.

I can certainly see why some people stick to using ridesharing services or using public transport instead.

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