Driving me around the bend
Josh Martin lifts the bonnet on new and unwelcome extras of holiday car rental costs.
The car rental check-in desk is a graveyard of happy holidays that might have been. Insufficient funds to cover unknown bonds, fees, licence rejections, excess reduction and insurance – all reasons many a happy holiday died at the starting gates.
At the very least it’s a marathon obstacle course of paperwork and a test of patience.
It turns out the car hire company I used (this time it was Enterprise) also saw our transaction as a marathon and not a sprint – what else can explain their glacial pace when it came to returning my deposit onto my credit card?
Six weeks later and my account is still patiently awaiting a 270 euro ($420) deposit to reappear while my American Express bill needs paying – hey, who needs a good credit history anyhow?
The signs were obvious from the get-go. We gulped slowly and approached the car hire terminal desk.
‘‘Passport, drivers licence and booking confirmation please,’’ said the attendant.
I could have almost scripted the next 30 minutes.
What seemed like a very simple and inexpensive car rental web booking process (with Googlefriendly phrases like ‘‘discount’’ and ‘‘price guarantee’’) turned into a complex and expensive financial workout. I swiftly dodged every up-sell possible (No, I don’t need a car-seat because we are spawn-less or snow-chains because it’s 28 degrees thankyou).
But the biggest extra charge (and traveller bug-bear) is insurance policies and excess reduction offers (often called Collision Damage Waiver or CDW). And in case the marathon wasn’t exhausting enough, there’s now a new obstacle which has floored more than a few travellers.
It centres on the industry’s response to web-based agencies who hire out cars on the fleet owner’s behalf.
It was all going well for the multinational fleet owners like Avis, Budget and Hertz as online brokers such as vroomvroomvroom, Expedia and HolidayAutos ensures rental cars don’t stay parked in their depots.
But soon enough some of the web agencies realised it was the selling of insurance excess waiver packages that prove more lucrative.
For many traditional car rental firms it was a step too far into their up-selling territory. Now, lots of car hire fleet owners disregard any insurance excess reduction policy sold to travellers by their online booking agencies and insist you also fork out (again) for their full insurance policy as well or face handing over a rather hefty deposit: upwards of 1000 euro is fairly standard in Europe.
Holidaymakers are left hurriedly transferring savings onto their credit cards or even worse have to stay parked because they believed they were fully covered and would not need to have hundreds on their Mastercard to hand over to
'What seemed like a very simple and inexpensive car rental web booking process... turned into a complex and expensive financial workout.'
one of the global car hire giants.
When I put this issue to car rental businesses Thrifty and Budget, they did not wish to comment.
Their smaller rival Jucy admitted that the excess they charge in the event of an accident is not reduced if you have booked full insurance through an online travel agent, so like their European counterparts, a hefty $2000 bond will need to be stumped up at the check-in counter or you’ll need to pay an additional rate to reduce any excess for damages to zero.
‘‘In the event of an accident, damage to any third party vehicle is covered in Jucy’s daily rental rate but the customer will be charged up to $2000 for damage caused to the Jucy vehicle. The customer can then liaise directly with their insurance providers for reimbursement of the excess,’’ a Jucy spokesperson explained.
That sounds like adding a thick wad of paperwork and phone calls to an already awful situation if you have an accident.
Jucy maintains that it works with its online agencies to ensure the condition is made clear to customers booking this way that buying cheaper CDW policies doesn’t mean they won’t also need to cough up a large deposit at check-in (only credit cards are accepted).
Clearly, not enough car rental companies are following this lead as first-time or occasional holiday car renters have contacted me after being caught out.
It may be buried in the small print (how could you miss it? Section 3, Article 6.7a, Clause D) but it’s another example to add to the most harrowing of the holiday transactions.
Just as you exit the arrivals hall weary from a stuffy plane full of arm-rest hogs and chattering children more angry queues, paperwork, hidden extras, and vehicle inspections (complete with under-axis scrape-detecting mirrors) must be navigated.
The bus and train companies never had such a good advertisement for their services.
Josh Martin is a London-based Kiwi journalist, who writes about travel, tourism, business, and consumer issues in between trips to places you’d rather be. Email josh.martin@fairfaxmedia.co.nz if you have a travel issue you’d like him to write about.