How to avoid losing your car rental deposit

One of the many things this job has taught me is that it’s a really bad idea to accept what company representatives tell you as the whole truth.

You have to check. Clearly they don’t say we’re up for the schlep it requires, in most cases.

Happily, it’s my job to check these things.

Muhammad Khallil e-mailed me recently about a battle he was having in getting a R6,000 deposit “hold” on his credit card released.

He had hired a car from Dollar Thrifty Car Rental’s Durban central branch on October 29 and returned it to the company’s King Shaka Branch three days later, but more than a month later, that hold had still not been released.

“Five telephone calls later and they still are not paying the deposit back,” Khallil said.

“I am a university student —I need my R6,000 to pay for a course and the deadline for registration is this week.”

A word about how such “holds” work — car hire companies swipe your card for the hold amount, not as a transaction, but as “pre-authorisation”.

This tells your bank to place a temporary “block” on that amount so that you can ’’ t use that available credit. That s so if you damage the car, they can whip that money out of your account.

Dollar Thrifty tells its clients: “Please allow up to four-seven working days, upon the return of your vehicle, for your deposit to reflect back into your account”.

Hence Khallil’s concern when a month went by with no such reflection in this account.

“When I phone Dollar Thrifty to ask about my deposit, they say they will check with the bank and will e-mail me as soon as the call is over so that I will have it in ‘black and white’, but I have not received an e-mail or a call back from this company,” he told me.

Many other former Dollar Thrifty clients have complained on HelloPeter.com about their deposits not being released within the promised time frame, including “John D”, who wrote: “You need to actively request your money back, and even when you do, they fail to assist and go silent.”

So I asked the company if that was true, and if so, how it was justified, and for specific feedback on Khallil’s matter.

At it happened, the hold on Khallil’s R6,000 was released a day after he e-mailed me. How did that happen? Well, that’s the million-dollar question.

Responding to my media query, Dollar Thrifty’s customer care manager, Ananda-Lee Mortimer, blamed the banks for the delay.

“All deposits are requested for release [from banks] within 24 hours of a rental terming,” she said.

“The bank will then capture and facilitate and manage the release of the client’s holding deposit.

“However, this is a bank process over which we have no control,” she said.

“When calling a bank, the bank will not divulge any information to Thrifty and rightfully do so for personal and security reasons to their customers.”

So I ran that past FNB. Why did the bank delay the release of the hold on Khallil’s R6,000 for so long?

FNB credit card division CEO Cilliers Kriel said Dollar Thrifty processed a R6,000 authorisation hold on Khallil’s account on October 29, the day he hired the car.

“This specific transaction was never settled by the merchant nor was it reversed by the merchant after the rental, so FNB maintained the authorisation, awaiting settlement,” he said.

Having received no instruction from Dollar Thrifty to terminate the authorisation, the bank reversed it on December 3, Kriel said.

That news came as a big surprise to Khallil.

“Dollar Thrifty kept telling me the amount was pending the bank’s release, for over a month,” he said.

“This now seems to be false, based on the bank’s response.”

I went back to Mortimer, twice, asking her to comment on the apparent contradiction, but she had yet to respond at the time of writing.

Pity.

The lesson: if your credit card funds are still on hold more than a week after you’ve returned a rental car, engage with your bank.

Ask them if the rental company has, in bank-speak, “terminated the authorisation”.

If not, you can’t be fobbed off by the rental company’s “the bank is delaying it” response.

Many other former Dollar Thrifty clients have complained on HelloPeter.com about their deposits not being released within the promised time frame of one week