Just want to update on how to claim the rental car damage. This was with Hertz in Australia. When we returned the car hubby told the service agent about the damage he caused to the bonnet of the car. Hertz charged our UK Amex Plat card nearly £445 (include credit card fee, conversion rate, gst (equiv to vat in UK), admin fees etc!) Based on the info provided by mia and Raffles, we have filed a claim with Amex - the insurance company processing the claim was AXA. The claim has now been processed and AXA said we would get a refund between 5 to 10 working days (not up yet, so no money has been refunded to our Amex card but we will monitor).
That was the good part, the bad part was that Hertz decided to tag onto the charges an additional hour of rental - claimed that hubby did not return the car before the expired time (which was not true). We told Amex / AXA about this, so they would not refund us for that. While the amount for one additional hour was not significant, we have been annoyed that Hertz would do this (probably hoping we would not notice). We have sent emails to Hertz about this, but no joy so far. Does anyone have a suggestion on how best to handle this? It is not the money, but it is a matter of principle.
I know the problem of over-charging customers by car rental companies has been fairly common, whether an hour or a day extra, higher amounts charged to booked rates, fuel scams, damages not caused, etc. Why is the culture in the car rental companies so bad? Low pay?