Originally Posted by
acinchus
Thanks for the welcome Elola, the FT forums have been very valuable in recent months after I actively started planning travel for the family.
You make a good point about trying first with Chase and seeing how far they go , but wouldnt they right at the beginning ask my primary coverage from my own auto insurance to cover damages from Alamo? Any suggestions on how to position this with Chase/Visa's administrator. Do you have any experience or heard on how others have gone to the credit card admin first, or is this just a logical suggestion?
I am determined to get Alamo to give their fleet records, since other posts have mentioned about that as a pre-requisite before loss of use will be considered for coverage.
Decided to not seek a replacement rental since we pretty much spent time today at the beach right off the hotel and only need car for short drives to dine.
My homeowners policy could cover personal belongings but with a high deductible my rough math shows I will not get anything incremental back from them. Will have to research this further.
The Chase advice is just to exhaust your options through them before getting your personal insurance involved, my Chase Visa Signature provides primary coverage, even on rentals in the US, so it's worth a shot. Thankfully, I've been lucky enough to get LDW through my employer so the one time my car was broken in to all I had to do was complete an accident report and get a new car.
Regarding the fleet utilization history as a requirement for charging loss of use fees, that's long been a subject of debate on FT, with differing results. My take on it is that the rental industry is highly regulated and as a result all the rental companies have very experienced and thorough legal departments and if it were illegal for them to collect loss of use fees they wouldn't try to impose them in the first place. Whether or not they actually try to collect after being challenged is more a result of their own cost/benefit analysis of the effort it would take to collect the fees rather than their legal ability to collect them if they so choose.