brobab

I picked up my rental at 12:45pm on 12/12. retunred it at 12:29pm 12/14. Should be a two day rental - right? My receipt indicated a charge for 3 days rental. I went to the preffered desk and was told, "Oh, well, we printed your check-out ticket early for you at 9:45 [the day of pick-up] - that way you don't have to wait for your car." HUH? Allocate three extra hours to my rental so that I get charged a full extra day and then BS me by saying it was all done for my convenience. Sounds to me like it was done for an extra days rental. Plus, I shouldn't have to wait for my car anyway as Presidents Club preferred.

Yes, they removed the extra days charge - but if I had not double checked the receipt, I would never have caught this. I sense a weekend of the past year's receipt checking coming up for me. The whole thing left a sour tase in my mouth.

IAHtraveler

Wow, that's annoying! What location was it? In two that I use very frequently (and the only 2 I've paid any attention to):
1. IAH defaults my time out to 11:59pm everytime I go there. Even if I have an 8AM rental, the tag is pre-printed when I arrive and it's defaulted to 16 hours later. This is very nice and often gets me a free day. A few times, I've seen it defaulted 4 hours ahead, too, but mostly end-of-day. I'm not sure if this is typical or because I'm CC.
2. RDU pushes the pickup time to 45 minutes after the reserved time. This has happened for every one of my ~10 rentals there in the past year.

Joshua

Hertz and National do this too.

On the positive side, it's easy to talk your way out of an extra hour or extra day charge if you return your rental late.

februaryfour

Oh great. Is that why my prepaid rental still turned out to have almost 50% more in charges? I wish I'd hung on to that receipt (don't tend to keep receipts for personal travel.)

3Cforme

A nice letter to the state Attorney General about deceptive business practices (the actual car pickup time can be the ONLY sensible contract start time) should yield an inquiry into this, and Avis' lawyers are smart enough to get some retraining for that station.

IAHtraveler

If you're preferred, you can log-in to your account and pull up the receipt. Otherwise, call Avis with your reservation # and request a copy of the receipt be mailed to you.

sdsearch

Are you Preferred? As a Preferred, they always email me my receipt (even if I do get a physical one too), and they do that basically instantly (at the time they process the return in front of me). Do they not do that for a prepaid rental?

I don't understand, though, why you would not have kept a receipt that had 50% more in charges than you were expecting. It's not that I check my receipt for how many days I rented, it's that I know in my mind about what I should be charged (based on my rez) as I'm returning the car, and if it isn't very close, then I check as soon as I can to see why the difference.

februaryfour

Unfortunately not; first time renter. I have an e-mail copy of my reservation somewhere hiding in my e-mail, which is not the same thing. I also just realized that we used Hertz, not Avis. Wow, talk about my own fail.

I just took another look at my reservation e-mail, and it said at the bottom that there was an approximate charge at the counter, and the approximate charge was within $10 of the final charge. My bad for not noticing that they'd notified me upfront; I'd thought "prepaid" meant "paid in full". This is what I get for not looking carefully. (*mad at self*)

username

I have always wondered about that. It seems the most fair way would be for them to update the actual pickup time upon leaving the gate but it does not seem that is done.

Usually though, it seems they push back the pickup time instead of listing it earlier.