jackal

I'll be honest with you, as a former rental car manager: if someone can't handle a $200 deposit on their card, I don't really want them renting my car.

You haven't had to call two dozen overdue renters twice a day who won't return their car and won't answer your phone calls and whose cards are declining for the balances due. You haven't had to resort to spending hours Googling for social media profiles to send messages to demanding the return of your vehicle. You haven't had to spend your days combing through neighborhoods and peering in garage door windows to look for your missing car. You haven't had to call all the local taxi companies and put a $200 bounty out for your missing car and pay out on that when the car is called in. You haven't had to call the police and fill out all the paperwork to report a car stolen, wait weeks for a recovery, wait weeks more for the cops to hold it in evidence, and then have to deal with trying to collect hundreds (or thousands) of dollars from the customer for days or weeks of back-due rental rates, fuel, damage, cleaning fees to get the dog hair and smoke and weed smell out of the car, towing and impound fees, etc., etc., etc.

Is a $200 deposit a guarantee that won't happen? Does that happen with everyone who doesn't have $200 to spare on their card? No, but I will say that in the 15 years I've been in this industry and the tens if not hundreds of thousands of rental transactions I've touched, almost every single problematic renter either had only a debit card or a credit card that was maxed to the point it couldn't even take a couple hundred bucks extra. Turns out there's some statistically-significant correlation between people whom banks trust enough to give a credit line large enough that customers can absorb a relatively trivial security deposit of a couple hundred bucks and people who can be trusted to treat the car reasonably, not use it in the commission of a crime, return it on-time or at proactively extend it and willingly pay the extra rental rate for doing so, not just "forget" to return the car, not disassemble the car for parts for their car (need a replacement bumper for your Dodge Charger? why not just rent one and take the bumper off of it!), and not outright steal the car.

Yes, other mitigating factors are a decent credit score, proof that you're an out-of-town resident and are flying out (in the form of an airline ticket), a checking account with a decent balance in it, etc., but honestly, if I were to open my own rental franchise (not something I'd recommend--the margins are slim to negative unless you really work to hire and train a top-notch crew of productive salespeople), I would decline all those rentals and only rent to credit-card holders that have at least a few hundred bucks extra they can spare for a security deposit. That one thing cuts out like 98% of risky renters right there.