Ask Gadling: Car rental scams, overcharges and paying for damages you didn’t cause

When it comes to rental cars, you can’t really live with them, and you can’t live without them. Despite weird pricing methods, overpriced gas charges and shady insurance tactics, sooner or later you’ll show up somewhere in need of a vehicle.

Thankfully, most rentals will make it from start to finish without any problems, but eventually, you are going to find yourself face to face with a rental company that claims you damaged their car, kept it longer than agreed upon or forgot to fill up the tank.

So, here are tips on how to deal with rental car company deals and scams – and what you can do to prevent and resolve issues.
Always pay attention to the contract

Logical tip, right? Rental car companies are extremely punctual. When you enter your rental information online, you’ll be asked for the exact times you need the vehicle. This is where they’ll get you – show up early, and they’ll add a few hours to the rental, show up late, and they may even charge you an extra day. The funny thing is that if you add extra hours when you place the rental order, the cost almost never goes up.

So – make sure to add a few hours to the front and end of your rental to allow for flight delays or early arrivals. Always print your online rental agreement and bring it with you. If you used a discount code when making the reservation, be sure to bring the coupon or page showing you are entitled to the discount.

When you arrive at the rental desk, take a close look at the contract, and compare it with what you printed at home. Do not let the rental company change the contract without discussing it with you. If you are offered an upgrade, make sure that any overages are charged at the original rate – you wouldn’t be the first to get a free upgrade, but be charged the upgraded rate for returning it an hour late.

If you are using an elite desk to pick up your vehicle, you’ll usually bypass the desk and drive straight to the gate – but even here, you’ll be given a rental agreement before driving off, so take a minute to go over the fine print here, and be sure to mention to the agent any damage you noticed on the vehicle (more on that in a moment.)

When asked whether you need insurance, you’ll usually be offered several different policies – most of which are already included in your own auto insurance policy or credit card. Be sure to check this before you arrive at the airport. Don’t pay for any insurance already covered by your own policy or card.

When renting a car, your credit card is your best friend

If you have a major credit card, chances are it’ll come with a variety of insurance protections built in. If not, consider upgrading to a card that does. When I was faced with a $2900 bill for a quarter inch scratch on a Mercedes I rented in Europe, American Express took care of the whole thing, and all I had to do was sign one piece of paper. Without the card, I would have been on the hook for the entire bill.

Always do a walk-around inspection before accepting your vehicle

What takes 30 seconds, and can save you $3000 on your insurance? (Hint: it does not involve calling Geico.) It is the rental car walk-around. Before driving off the lot, always do a close inspection of the entire care. Renting at night? Pull out your flashlight. Make sure you report every single ding, dent, scratch, scrape or missing body panel to a car rental agent. Then, get them to note it on your rental agreement and make a note of the name of the agent that witnessed the damage.

Never, ever accept their word that it is “ok” – when you return the car with damage that was not your fault, claiming someone said it would be “ok” won’t be enough to get charges waived.

I know how much of a waste of time this is, and I’m sure you just want to get the hell away from the airport and check into your hotel, but damage to rental cars is big business -and if you can’t prove you did not damage the car, you will be charged to get it fixed.

The gas pricing scam

Isn’t it convenient that gas stations around the airport charge up to 20% more than the same brand away from the airport?

I know of one major international airport where the gas station is owned by the largest rental operator – making for a perfectly legal racket. When you rent your vehicle, you’ll be asked how you plan to fill its tank – you’ll either fill it up yourself, have the rental firm fill it up for you upon return (pre-arranged) or just ignore the whole issue and pay $7/gallon when they realize the tank is half empty. Pre-paid gas is a scam because no matter how much you use, you’ll pay for a full tank of gas. The only way to make this work is if you know in advance that you’ll arrive at the airport running on fumes.

Whatever you do – don’t just return the car with an empty tank. Of course, if you are running really late for the last flight of the day, you don’t have a choice, but if you let the rental company take care of filling up the car, they’ll fill it with special Unicorn juice that costs three times the current gas price at the local station.

One word of advise: always keep your gas receipts, and make sure you use a local station no more than 2-4 miles away. I’ve experienced a firm that claimed the gas station I used was too far away to let the car qualify as “full” – so they charged me $15 for what they claimed was two gallons.

Upon returning the car, the rental firm claims you damaged it

Funny how the rental company lets you drive off the lot without checking their car, but insists on checking every corner of it when you bring it back. Even if they don’t do an immediate inspection upon return, rest assured that they will check it out, and charge you for any damage that was not reported on the rental agreement. And don’t think that they’ll ignore a single thing – even the smallest scratch is enough for them to charge you.

If you return a car and the inspection uncovers damage, always check against the rental agreement to see whether the damage was already reported. If the damage is new, and you had not seen it when you inspected it yourself, you are out of luck – and will have to pay for it. If possible, make photos of the damage from all angles and write a clear description of the damage the rental company claims you caused. This will prevent them from adding other damage to the repair bill that was not caused by you.

In some cases, they may not even contact you, they’ll just charge your card for the entire amount they feel is fair. Talk about a nasty surprise when you get your statement.

And get this – they’ll also charge you the full non-discounted rental price for every day the vehicle is out of commission while someone repairs said scratch. This means that the kind of damage you can get fixed at the local body shop for $200, could cost the rental firm $2000 to fix. Rental car damage is big business – and you could end up being the one that funds it.

Now, there are of course incidents where the damage is not only your fault, but also quite evident. In those cases, you’ll want to contact the rental firm before returning the car and contact your own insurance firm or credit card company. If the vehicle is no longer drivable, ask them to bring a replacement.

When returning your car, always ask for a receipt

This is where it pays to give yourself some extra time at the airport. When you return the vehicle, wait for an agent to do their inspection, hand them your gas receipt (unless you want them to fill it up) and ask for a final rental receipt. Yes – in many cases you can just drop it off, leave the keys in the ignition and walk away, but if they overcharge you, you’ll have a hard time fighting this. Like with rental car damage, they’ll simply charge your card without contact you about overages.

[Photos: Hertz rental: Flickr/Alex-S, Car crash: Flickr/Daveeynin, Gas station: Flickr/Fortyseven]

Free Hertz #1 Club Gold membership for Delta Skymiles members

Here is a simple bonus promotion for Delta Skymiles members – follow this link, and enter Delta Skymiles as the program name, and 5765 as the promotion code – and you’ll get instant free access to the Hertz #1 Club Gold membership. Of course, if you are not (yet) a Skymiles member, nothing is stopping you from heading over to Delta.com to sign up (also free).

The program normally costs $60/year, but that fee is waived for you. Sadly, the perks are limited to instant vehicle pickup and drop-off, but when you are in a hurry at the airport, every saved minute helps.

You’ll need to provide Hertz with a credit or debit card, and your drivers license number, and after your first rental as a Gold member, you’ll be able to bypass the desk and walk right up to your car. But best of all, you’ll get a nice shiny gold card for your wallet. A list of all Hertz #1 Club benefits can be found here.

Escape from New York: Five tips for leaving the city when flights fail you

New York is no stranger to tourist and business travel. We get lot of guests here, and eventually, their trips must come to an end. When the weather turns harsh, this can be problematic. Spring may be close, but March and April snowstorms happen, and there are always spring showers to make getting off the ground at JFK or LaGuardia a pure living hell. Whether you’re traveling in the northeast corridor or need to get to a different airport to get home, there are options.

I came face to face with this problem around six years ago. I was trying to get back to Boston, where I lived at the time. I was in New York every week on business and by Friday wanted nothing more than to get home. I stepped outside at 2 PM and saw snow accumulating on the street, even despite the city traffic. I checked Delta‘s website and saw that nothing had been canceled. So, I high-tailed out to LaGuardia hoping for the best. After a two-hour cab ride, I hit the Marine Air terminal only to find that the website wasn’t being kept up to date.

I needed some options and the thought of another two hours of taxi rides in a blizzard didn’t thrill me. Back in Manhattan, I figured I could pick up a train on Amtrak from Penn Station (which wound up working out). Along the way, I learned some tricks that can help anyone traveling the northeast or looking for an alternative airport when hope appears to be lost.1. Don’t fear public transportation
There’s no subway to LaGuardia, but there are buses. Catch the Q48 from the main airport or the Q47 from Marine Air (if you’re taking the Delta Shuttle). Get off at Roosevelt Ave in Queens, where the F or 7 train will get you back to Midtown. From there, it’s easy to hit Penn Station (New Jersey, Amtrak) Grand Central Station (Connecticut and New York) or the PATH train (if you want to try your luck at Newark). From JFK, you can catch the Skytrain to the subway, but brace yourself for a very long ride – the fastest I ever made it to Midtown was around an hour and a half.

2. Rental cars are risky
First, when flights aren’t taking off, there will be no shortage of people with the same idea. So, supply will be limited. Also, nasty weather makes for nightmarish driving conditions. You’ll be extremely unhappy behind the wheel, a situation that’s likely to be made worse by traffic. If you want to try driving, take public transportation out to the ‘burbs and use a rental agency out there (call first to make sure they can help you out).

3. . Be mindful of the other side
Getting out isn’t enough: you also have to think about where you’re going. If bad weather’s pounding New York, there’s a pretty good chance the situation in Philadelphia, Newark and Boston is also pretty ugly. If you’re having someone pick you up, call ahead. Arrange for a taxi or town car in advance. Definitely check the situation on the ground if you’re trying one of these airports instead. During my trek to Boston during the blizzard a few years ago, I called a local taxi service and asked to be picked up at South Station – and requested that they ask for my name before letting anyone into the cab. Sound arrogant? Well, it saved my ass. I saw the driver turn at least four people away as I pushed through the crowd, and I have no idea how many people tried before I got there.

4. Giving up may not be an option
Sometimes, it’s tempting to quit and just get a hotel room for a night (or a few, depending on how severe the storm is). Depending on what’s going on in the city, however, this may be a pricey alternative. As with rental cars, you won’t be the only person to think of this. Also, a busy night or weekend can cut available rooms down to nothing fast. If you are able to score some digs, you could wind up paying a fortune. If you do decide to stay in the city, hunt for the boutique hotels that y may never have noticed otherwise: they’re your best bet.

5. Draft your friends and family
During my escape from New York, I called my wife and asked her to book my train ticket for me. Handheld computing has come a long way since then, but it’s still inconvenient to hunt for alternatives on an iPhone or Blackberry. If you have someone who’s sitting in a warm office or home, hit him or her up for a hand. They’ll be able to find hotels or other travel arrangements easier than you will. By the time you get from the airport back into Manhattan, you may have a plan that only needs to be executed.

Budget and Avis ban smoking in rental cars

First you couldn’t smoke on planes. Then trains banned smoking. Now, you can’t smoke in rental cars, at least, not if you rent from Avis or Budget. As of October 1, all cars in both rental companies’ fleets will be non-smoking.

Avis and Budget say the policy came about in response to the needs of renters, citing a non-smoking car as the most-popular rental request. Cars that have been smoked in also require additional cleaning and are out of service longer, costing the companies more money. A spokesman for the Avis Budget Group says they expect some smokers to be upset with the new rules and to take their business elsewhere, but that they think overall the new plan will attract more customers than it will lose.

Avis and Budget will be the first major rental car companies to ban smoking entirely (others offer “non-smoking” cars but many don’t guarantee them), though they are only instituting the ban among their North American fleet, not worldwide. Each car will undergo an inspection upon return and renters who have smoked in the vehicle will be charged a cleaning fee of up to $250.

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No discounts for rental cars

There’s still money in rental cars, according to the latest from the New York Times. In May, the average rental rate (airport) for a compact ride was $345.99 for a week – as long as you booked it seven days in advance. That’s an increase of 73 percent from $199.65 in May 2008, according to Abrams Consulting Group, which watches this stuff. As of mid-June, the 2008-to-2009 change was narrower: $210.38 to $347.44 (up 65 percent).

The price increases, it seems, are our own fault. Demand is down 15 percent, which forces the rental car companies to cut their fleets back – ultimately engineering a shortage that pushes up prices. So, if we were renting more cars, they would be cheaper.

One of the side-effects of this dynamic is that cars are staying in the rental fleets longer. Remember when you’d never see a rental car with more than 30,000 miles on it? Well, don’t count on that threshold any more. The average rental car’s age is now up to 11 months – that has to be forever in dog years – as companies try to extract as much value from each ride as possible.

There are a few ways you can find a cheaper rental car, which you can learn after the jump.

Start looking early. If a rental car company isn’t sold out for when you want it (always a possibility), you’ll pay a fortune for the little remaining inventory.

Skip the airport lots. You could wind up paying an extra 30 percent that way. Head into the local city instead – or even better, the ‘burbs. A friend of mine used to manage a rental car location outside Boston and used to tell me just how accommodating they would be: discounts, pickup and drop-off and so on.

Don’t be afraid to upgrade. The last thing you want to do is sink even more money into this endeavor, but a few extra dollars can go a long way, especially if you need to be comfortable on a long road trip.

Want more tips? Read the original article in the New York Times.