Booking a longer rental and returning early makes no sense at all to me as a "strategy" to get around this charge -- it allows them to reprice the daily charge which could go up dramatically. They were perfectly willing to keep my daily rate if I was more than one hour late.

The question is, given that the timestamp out is not exact and often reflects when I get the rental agreement rather than when I leave the lot, why shouldn't they be required to have a reasonable grace period?