Originally Posted by
RichardInSF
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?
Richard - my point being that if I'm already booking for say 2 days 4 hours, it's almost always a better deal to just book for 3 full days. Obviously compare the two charges, but it's usually the same when you're booking online in my experience. The hourly rates are high enough when you book more than 1 hour over, it is usually cheaper to pay the day rate, which it practically does, but doesn't give you any overage. Thus you can have a car for 2 days, 6 hours and wind up paying for the equivalent of four days (since you're paying for the third day but only using 4 hours, plus then getting dinged for two hours at the hourly rate, which are close to another day's cost).
In this case, you can usually be made whole by the manager, but it's not desirable if you're in a rush to the terminal.