amanwalksintoabar...

I'm wondering how best to respond to something that's taken me completely by surprise.

I rented a vehicle for about a week from Budget at Newark airport in late December 2010, returning it on 1/1/11. This morning I received two letters from the Claims Unit claiming well over $1000 for damage to the car.

The pictures enclosed appear to show a crack in the front bumper and a scuff along it. I am pretty sure I'm not responsible for this - it's possible that someone may have backed into the car when it was parked, but if so I certainly didn't notice (I did a walk-around when I returned it, as I always do, and the attendant didn't mention it either). In any case, the amount claimed seems rather excessive, and I'm at a loss as to why Budget waited 4 months to contact me.

Normally this wouldn't worry me: as I booked through the UK site, LDW was automatically included in my rate. This is shown on the rental slip I signed at the counter (I have a copy, and Budget have also sent a copy with this letter indicating the same). I wouldn't be too annoyed if I just had to pay the excess and forget about everything else.

However one of the letters claims I breached the rental agreement by either allowing someone else to drive the car (which I didn't) or by "failing to provide CCRG with an accident or incident report or failing to cooperate fully with the investigation of the same". I don't know what a CCRG is, but I did indeed not provide an incident report because, well, I didn't know there had been an incident. I can only assume that this alleged breach has invalidated my insurance and thus rendered me liable for the full amount.

As I live in the UK, I don't have further insurance through either my credit card or any car insurance policy, so I'm at a bit of a loose end as to just what the hell to do now. I think it unfair for me to pay the full amount when I don't think I'm responsible, and I paid for insurance anyway. On the other hand, I can't really respond to legal proceedings in the US and don't really want my credit history damaged in case I refuse to pay.

Apologies for the length of this post, but any suggestions would be much appreciated!

darben

First thing I would do is cancel the credit card I paid with for the rental

mirobatka

Same thing happened to my friend. Budget sent him a bill for $1500 worth of damages to a car he had returned 4 months earlier.
He called them and told them that he wasn't going to pay for something they had no proff he had done. After all, the attendant did do a walk-around of the car and didn't notice anything, so how does he know it wasn't someone else ho had done it? After the phone call, Budget told him to forget about it and dropped the matter.

amanwalksintoabar...

Just rang them up and they said they'd close the file if I sent them an email setting out my version of events.

Thanks very much for the replies - I probably should have contacted them first, but to be honest, I somewhat panicked when I received what appeared to be a letter before claim for $1,257 and was wondering if I should begin drafting a proper letter of defence.

(Fortunately said credit card has since expired, so no worries there!)

It just makes me wonder a) why they waited 4 months, and b) how the hell they managed to spend $1,257 fixing a crack and a scuff!

randix

"Just rang them up and they said they'd close the file if I sent them an email setting out my version of events."

I'm not doubting your version of the events, but that response suggests some scary stuff goin' on...

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amanwalksintoabar...

Apparently the issue wasn't the damage; it was that I hadn't reported it (because I didn't know it had occurred). This breached the contract, so voided my insurance cover.

Now that I've detailed over the telephone and in an email my version of events they've emailed confirming that they've closed the file.

I suppose the scary thing is that they went straight to issuing the claim rather than simply asking me about the damage at any point in the last 4 months. Also I'm fairly confident the car was just fine when I returned it, but that's a moot point now.

biggestbopper

The issue is more Budget's attempt to ripoff a foreigner by waiting to make a fake claim. No doubt very profitable for them as many folks will not dispute these claims, no matter how baseless.

I had much the same thing happen to me with a rental in Southern France years ago. Finally had to get my US credit card company to charge back the crooked charges.

jackal

Damages are deceptive; a crack in a bumper would necessitate a replacement of the bumper cover. A $1,000 charge is not unreasonable for that.

I'm assuming CCRG would be Cendant Car Rental Group, the former parent company of Avis Budget. Cendant (which owned and operated several travel-related industries, including at one point IIRC Orbitz) spun off their car rental operations, which were renamed Avis Budget Group. Sounds like their claims department might be using old paperwork...?

Any claims department with any company is going to do just that. There are legal requirements the claims department has to meet in order to fall under insurance and collection regulations. What you were sent is legally termed a "demand letter," and without specific wording (which, unfortunately, sounds sometimes unnecessarily harsh), it doesn't legally meet the requirements of being a demand letter. Insurance companies usually won't pay unless a demand letter has been sent. Asking you about the damage nicely isn't how insurance companies and claims offices work. If indeed they are right and the customer is wrong (which is often the case), asking nicely just weakens their case if they do need to pursue the customer--and in any case, it delays the proceedings further, as they need to wait several more weeks for further correspondence.

As for the delay: four months is a long time and is representative of an understaffed claims department. They should be making initial contact (barring some odd thing, like that they had an incorrect address for you) within about three weeks at the most. However, understanding that claims offices do get backed up or are forced to wait for things like backed-up body shops to even get estimates out, I wouldn't say that receiving a bill four months after the fact is "proof" that the company is running a scam. If indeed you weren't covered by LDW, the claims office should be able to produce documentation even a year or two after the fact that the damage was found at (or within a short while after) return. That factor--the interval of time between your return and when they discovered the damage, rather than the interval of time between your return and when they contact you about it--is the one that determines the validity of the claim.

And at a major corporate-operated store at a major airport location like EWR, the question of whether the rental company is trying to scam you shouldn't even come up. They're not. There may be a paperwork mix-up, or there may be some ambiguity (like there was in your case, with the possibility that the damage occurred in Avis's parking lot) and the rental company may assume in the event of that ambiguity that you caused it, but they're not intentionally charging you for damage that they know was not caused by you. (You can't unequivocally say the same thing about franchised locations of especially the value brands, but corporate-operated stores do not intentionally operate with shady business practices.)

Sounds like it all ended well in your case, though. They probably just wanted a written statement from you to satisfy their need to categorize the damage under the "covered by valid LDW" category. Once they received that from you, it was filed properly and the case was closed.

AdMEL

As always, well put!

With regard to your point that the idea of scamming at a large corporate location shouldn't even come up, I would go further and say that in my experience, corporate locations of Hertz and particularly Avis are very lenient when it comes to damage - at least in Australia. Avis does not require damage checks at pick-up (Hertz sometimes does) and neither check on return. Despite occasionally scratching a hire car (nothing serious), I have never been questioned or charged for anything, despite all the horror stories about being charged for damage to hire cars.