I have waited several weeks before posting this story, as I wanted to give Avis an opportunity to fix the problem. Unfortunately, I’ve been informed they’re not fixing it, so now I will tell it -- primarily as a warning to anyone else planning to rent a car from Avis in Milan.

I am an Avis President’s Club member and have been an exclusive Avis renter for 15 years – both business and leisure. So I have a long history with Avis. From a customer service standpoint this appears to make no difference to them.

I rented a car upon arrival at MXP (Milan) last month for a week in Northern Italy. I booked the car on-line and declined all optional insurance coverage. When I went to pick up the car in the terminal garage, the man grabbed the folder with my name on it. He said, “You want insurance?” “No thank you,” I said, “I do not need it.”

He opened the contract, looked at it and handed it to me. He pointed to 3 or 4 circles and said, “Initial, initial, initial, sign.” Same drill – I’ve done it a thousand times. I looked at the contract. It was all in Italian. I initialed, signed and left.

Fast forward to the end of the trip, and I return the vehicle, as scheduled, full of diesel, at the Venice airport. I turned in the keys and contract at the counter and they said they’d mail a receipt – because it’s an inter-city rental, they can’t close it out for me right then and there.

Credit card bill arrives. I’m charged almost twice what I should have been. I look up the charges on-line and see that I was charged for collision insurance and the fuel purchase option, neither of which I accepted or wanted.

I called Avis. “There must be a mistake. I did not take insurance nor the fuel purchase option.” I described what happened when I picked up the car and that I could not read the contract, as I don’t speak Italian. I explain that when I reserved the car I declined all coverage, which is clearly in my reservation. I suggest she look at my long record of rentals and see how I have never accepted any insurance coverage or the fuel option. They’ll look into it and call me back. The woman was very unhelpful, would not listen to me and gave me no sense that she was going to try to get this cleared up. (We’re talking about excess charges of a little more than US $300.)

A little over two weeks passes. Today I get a call back from the same unhelpful woman: “Sir, you signed for these options. You must pay for them. The people in-country will not reverse your charges.”

Me: “As I told you before, I may well have signed it, but I couldn’t read it. I told the agent very clearly that I did not want or need insurance and we never even discussed a fuel option and I returned the car full of gas. You definitely have a record of that. He gave me a contract, written in Italian, to sign. I had to trust that it reflected what we had just talked about.

Further, I said, “look back over 15-plus years of my hundreds of rentals with Avis. Never on a single occasion, either domestically or internationally, have I accepted either the insurance or the advance fuel purchase option. Not one time. In this case he asked me if I wanted the insurance that I had already declined in my reservation and, again, I said no. We didn’t even talk about the fuel option. He gave me a contract in a language I can’t read and I signed it. After all these years as an Avis President’s Club member why do you think I would suddenly accept these coverages for the very first time, fill the car with gas before returning it and then call you to try to get the charges removed from my bill? Logic alone tells you that it makes no sense. Plus, you can see for yourself, I have no history of doing anything like this.

“This is either a mistake or I was taken advantage of by the Italian operator in Milan. If it is an honest mistake it should be no problem fixing it. If you aren’t willing to do that, I can only assume that either you don’t believe me and my 15-year record of rentals with your company is of no value in demonstrating my history, or the operator in Milan intentionally defrauded me and you aren’t willing to do anything about it."

The woman kept insisting that this was the final decision by the people in Italy and there was nothing they could do about it because “I was not there with you when you talked to the agent. There is no way to prove your case. It is their decision and there is nothing anyone in the US can do about it.”

I told her I found it hard to believe that this US-based company is completely victim to their operators all over the world and that even in a case like this they do not have the power to override them. She said she’d try talking to “management” one more time and get back to me but told me I should not expect anything to change.

I cannot imagine how it could possibly be worth it to Avis to a) let this stand for any customer under this set of circumstances, let alone a long-standing member of their elite tier; and b) hold the line on the issue and watch someone like me potentially walk away and never do business with them again.

Does anyone know the name & contact info of a person high up at Avis who I could address a letter to? I still have to believe that someone in a management position will hear this story, look at the record and make the right decision. After all these years, I’m certainly going to give them that shot. Perhaps someone, at some level, will “Try Harder.”