Q: I recently reserved an SUV with Thrifty Car Rental through Travelocity. I was quoted a rate of $375 for the week for a full-size SUV in Costa Rica.
But when we arrived at the car rental counter, we found out that Thrifty didn’t even have a full-size SUV — only a compact SUV. There were five grown men in our party so the smaller vehicle would not work. We were forced to cancel our reservation and go next door to another car rental company, where the full-size SUV cost $619 for the week.
I notified Travelocity when I returned home and an agent asked me to fax the information to its customer relations department. I never received any response or acknowledgment that they were looking into it.
I am certainly soured on Travelocity and Thrifty. If your online reservations aren’t valid, what’s the point in making them? Any help or advice you could offer would be greatly appreciated.
– Chip Joseph, Cleveland, Ohio
A: If you’re quoted a rate on a full-size SUV then that’s what you ought to get — and if you don’t, then whoever gave you that rate is responsible for making it right.
I spent a little time on Travelocity.com to figure out what may have happened. When I tried to pull up a quote on the site for San Jose, Costa Rica, it didn’t show me an option for a full-size SUV (so it’s possible that this was a temporary issue that has since been resolved). But I was still able to retrieve all the vehicle categories, and there can be no doubt that if you were offered a full-size SUV, then Travelocity would have been crystal-clear that you were getting a Ford Expedition “or similar” with a capacity to hold seven passengers.
You did the right thing by keeping the documentation on the car Travelocity offered you. When you’re dealing with a claim against a company, the first demand you’re likely to get is: “Prove it.” Faxing those documents to Travelocity should have done the trick. I don’t know why it didn’t.
I would have tried to contact Travelocity again to give it a second chance. Sometimes faxes get lost or misplaced. The claims process can also take a while, so it is not out of the question that Travelocity would have eventually gotten back to you.
I contacted Travelocity on your behalf, and you were asked to re-send the documents. The company promptly sent you a refund of $244 — the difference between the price of your new rental and the original Thrifty rental.
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I was upgraded at no cost (so far) through rental reservations made at Priceline.com for a Budget rental. I reserved a minivan for 6 days at Budget at Chicago-Midway airport for a total of $229 – over half the price I could find elsewhere. Upon loading my Toyota Sienna, I realized we needed a larger vehicle. Within minutes we were upgraded to a Chevy 12-passenger van, at no extra cost. Well … they were going to charge us $12/day more until they saw our damaged luggage — literally smashed luggage (another story). My theory is to kill ‘em with kindness. Attitude does matter. What goes around comes around.