If you’ve ever put a dent or ding on a rental car, you know the drill. The paperwork. The insurance claims. And the often outrageous repair bills.
Sometimes, customers even end up with a nasty form letter from a company threatening to report them to a collection agency if they don’t pay up, pronto.
It’s almost always a scam, of course. Repair bills are routinely inflated by hundreds of dollars — a tidy and completely illegal profit.
In the meantime, how do you avoid getting stuck with a ridiculous car repair bill? Here are three tips, which came to me courtesy of several car rental insiders who I’ve spoken with recently:
1. Bring a camera and take plenty of pictures. Walk around your vehicle and take photos when you pick the car up and when you drop it off. If there’s an accident, snap away. These photos are your own evidence, and if there is a dispute during the repair process, you’ll want to refer to them.
2. Get an independent repair estimate. The car rental company will insist that it is irrelevant, but don’t pay any attention to it. If its own repair bill is hundreds of dollars higher, then it will most certainly matter — perhaps not to your car rental company, but to a court of law.
3. Hire a lawyer and copy the authorities on your correspondence. A car rental company or one of the companies it hires to handle damage collections will either settle with you or abandon its claim if you do the following: First, hire an attorney to handle all the correspondence between you and the rental firm. Second, copy the state attorney general (here’s a listing of state AGs). And third, copy the state insurance commission or state board of insurance in the state in which you rented and the state in which the rental company is based.
Good luck — and here’s hoping you never need to use these tips.
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I had a similar experience when I picked up a car at night, the agent at the small sattlite lot was so eager to upgrade me to a um better car, as it turned out I never used the car, it sat in my daughters garage. I drove it to the airport and turned it in, by the time I got to their inside counter they had “discovered” a hole in the windshield under the wiper blade, I went back and sure enough it was there, just as it was probably there when I was “upgraded” I raised a loud stink at the counter..to no avail, but then I asked for their coporate manager, and attorney…still no dice but I left with their names, phone numbers, and who accepted legal service, sent them a registered letter when I got home- and the threat to sue in small claims court..They backed down and credited me…a pain for sure..but I am a maniac now when I get a rental…so far no more games