How long is a day?
It’s however long your car rental company wants it to be.
That’s what Peter DeForest, a risk management consultant from San Francisco, discovered when he picked up a car from Hertz in Austin recently. A flight delay had made him three hours late to the rental counter. He asked if the agency could adjust his rate.
“They said the charges couldn’t be refunded for any reason,” he says. “So Hertz has a 21-hour day.”
Sorta. A look at its rental terms, which DeForest agreed to when he booked the car, confirms it: There are no refunds for unused days, or for that matter, hours, on prepaid vehicles. A Hertz spokeswoman told me as a matter of policy, cars are rented by the day. DeForest could have brought the car back after only an hour, but he still would have paid for a day.
Hertz is hardly alone. Across the travel industry, companies are adopting clever definitions of everything from “day” to “year” — all with the apparent intent of keeping your money, or just bringing in a little more. No surprise that they’re doing it now, when travel spending is circling the drain. But it’s a little unsettling to their customers that they’re doing it with practically no disclosure.
Take what happened to Ronald Di Costanzo, a retired college professor from Santa Monica, Calif. When he canceled a United Airlines flight a few months ago, a representative told him he had “one year” to rebook the ticket and use the credit. But when he phoned the airline a few months later to reuse his credit, an employee told him his credit had expired.
“I am sure I didn’t talk with the entire Indian subcontinent, but I came close,” he told me. “First, I asked for a supervisor; next, I was asked if I wanted a supervisor; third, I was passed off automatically to another supervisor. All said the same thing, although in increasingly dogmatic terms.”
United offered him a $25 coupon for the trouble, but kept the $392 credit.
Want me to go on? I could tell you the story of Larry Thompson, who lost his ticket credit on American Airlines after one year was abbreviated to nine months. But I’ll spare you.
How do you stay safe from these time bandits?
No guessing games
It used to be a given that a hotel’s check-out time was at noon and that you had a year from the time you canceled your flight to rebook your ticket. And even when it wasn’t, you could usually talk your hotel or airline into letting it slide. Not anymore. Hotels are moving their mandatory checkout times to 11 a.m. (and even earlier) while airlines are strictly enforcing the one-year-from-the-date-of-the-booking rule, when it comes to credit. My point is, you can’t guess what the rules are based on past experiences. In fact, you can check into a hotel at 6 p.m., but if you stay past noon the next day, you could face a late checkout charge or, in extreme cases, have to pay for another day. Ditto for airlines. You have one year from the day you bought the ticket, not the day you were supposed to fly.
Talk is cheap
It used to be that when a reservations agent assured you that you had a one-hour grace period for your car rental, you could be reasonably assured that you’d actually have a full hour. But what do they know? Some car rental companies have shortened their “hour” to 29 minutes; others have done away with it altogether. Are reservationists lying when they claim you have an hour? Not necessarily. Some may not be aware of the changes. Others just don’t speak English, and may be agreeing with everything you say, since there’s no script for them to read. Bottom line: You can’t trust anything an employee tells you by phone or in person. If you’re told that you have a year to use your credit, get it in writing.
Even the written rules can be slippery
If you can’t trust your own experience, or the word of an employee, who can you rely on? I would advise you to review your contract — either the one that came with your ticket or the one on an airline, car rental company or hotel’s Web site. I might be wrong, though. Travel companies don’t like to honor their old contracts when they change the rules. Consider what happened to Delta Air Lines when it updated its luggage rules retroactively, forcing customers to pay $25 for the first checked bag after they had already paid for their flights and agreed to the old rules). When a company doesn’t play fair, your only choice is to appeal to the government or to take the company to court. But normally, having a copy of the contract is enough to prove you right.
I wish I could say this was a new problem, but it isn’t. A decade ago, one of my readers caught American Airlines closing its cabin doors early and refusing to allow him on the plane. Of course, airlines want it both ways: They want to leave whenever they want and they also want to define “on time” in a very un-American way. They’ve managed to persuade the federal government that a flight is “on time” if it’s within 15 minutes of its scheduled arrival time.
Try showing up for a date 15 minutes late and reassuring your sweetheart that the government still considers you “on time.” (Please tell me how it goes. My contact information is listed below.)
Even though some travel companies have a distinguished record of fudging their numbers, this is a particularly bad time for travelers to be caught on the wrong side of the clock. Sure, you can do all the due diligence — research the rules, don’t believe anything that an employee tells you and travel with printouts of your contract — but it’s hardly assuring when you know many travel companies are out to get you.
No wonder that more of us are staying home. This is no way to travel.
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{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Being retired we used to travel a lot by air and use rental cars. Due to all the hassle, problems, etc., etc., we now do more travel, in the US and Canada, by car. It may take longer to do what we want BUT we can do it at our own pace and not worry about whether the flight will leave, will we make the connection, will the rental car be a problem, will our bags arrive, etc. We are still forced to take a flight to places that are too far to really drive to (HI, AK, Europe) but tend to do more around the US these days. We also look for “Mom & Pop” motels that more often then not treat you like an actual customer and guest or B&B’s.
Ok – if you arrive late – you can ask that the rental TIME be adjusted. If he has a pre-paid reservation – then he has a pre-paid reservation – most car rental companies will happily adjust the time out to reflect the actual time out. But asking for a refund, well, thats not gonna happen.
Companies have been developing these mentalities for years now. When times were good they put in restrictions because they could – people needed the service they provided and the service was scarce. Now, times are tough and they are making it worse – and they drive away repeat business.
If you are going to treat your customers like the worst discount rental company out there – if you are going to charge people Hertz rates and provide Advantage service, you are going to drive your customers to Advantage – if they have to put up with the silly, inflexible rules, people are going to save the money and go to the cheaper solution.
Travel is down, and people are less interested. For the life of me, I don’t understand why the various travel companies don’t become MORE friendly and make it EASIER to travel in order to maintain business in this down time. There are so many ways in which they could help the customer without incurring much expense.
My husband and I are retired. As we speak, he is on his way from NY to OR in our Roadtrek, bought so that he can avoid the time constraints and idiotic beaurocracy of airports and hotels. He also wants to be able to go where he wants, when he wants, without having to reserve weeks in advance in order to get a fair price. I sometimes accompany him on these “jaunts,” but, more often than not, I am experiencing more exotic destinations. So, I reserve in advance, fly to most places, (I will meet him in OR) and allow plenty of time to put up with all the nonsense that is related to travel in today’s world.
On the positive side, Southwest is a great airline. I misread my e-ticket, stupidly thinking the flight number was the departure time–I am still wondering how I could make such an idiotic mistake. I arrived at the counter 10 minutes after the plane had closed its doors. I apologized to the agent and asked what my options were. The wonderful Southwest employee told me I could buy another ticket or fly standby for the next flight, which was pretty open. I took my chances, got listed on standby, and flew 3.5 hours later. I love Southwest. I wish they flew more places directly!
So, here is a question: If Southwest can offer decent customer service AND prices, why can’t other airlines manage the same thing? Ditto goes for car rental agencies.
Well I’m again talking the opportunity to PRAISE American Airlines for there handling of my screwup a few weeks ago.
I had cancelled a trip last year in Oct due to my wife haveing medical problems.
I was rebooking it the end of July when I noticed I had booked it in June.
Dummmm! I was thinking I had until Oct, even thought I should have remembered buying it in June.
So, I emaild AA, explaining my screw up, asking them to extend the time so I could re-book.
Well American Airlines not only extended the time frame but gave me another year.
So American did me right.
I was hoping that Elliott would post it since I sent it to him when it happened.
I like to praise companies when they do well & work hard against those that don’t.
American did well this time.
They can if/when they can afford to, depending on the situation. There are “few” cases of such if one looks hard enough.
The professor’s rant is downright silly. Exactly which company, rents a product by the day, gives you a refund for keeping the product for less than 24 hours. Try this. Go to blockbuster, rent a movie and return it the same day. Do you expect a partial refund. NO. Then why would this dummy expect one from Hertz?
If you arrive late, Hertz will happily change the pickup time to make sure that you get your full 24 hours.
The simple truth of the matter is that most travel companies have good service, for its frequent travellers. Service for non-frequent travellers is more hit and miss.
“…If Southwest can offer decent customer service AND prices, why can’t other airlines manage the same thing? Ditto goes for car rental agencies…”
Unions!!!
I have been forced to join a union to get a job and forced to work with them as a manager. They are the biggest time wasters I have ever seen. If they aren’t screaming “not my job” then they’re screaming at management for doing something like picking up a piece of trash.
What’s wrong with what Hertz did? If they’d rented his care to someone else when he didn’t show up on time, the customer would (quite rightly) been angry with them. Depending on the contract, and whether it was prepaid, doing so may have been illegal. They couldn’t recoup the income loss from a no-show by renting it to someone else, so it seems perfectly reasonable to charge for the period the car was reserved for, not the period it was actually used.
Jennifer IS the one.
If your flight arrived early and your gate was not occupied by an airliner running on time, so you got off the plane early:
Do you demand a refund from the airline?
What do you expect from the car rental agency as you arrive early?
Here lies Fast-Gun Elmer
RIP
Nobody was faster