Here to help
Behold, the buying calendar.
It’s the ultimate consumer tool. If you’re planning to spend money in 2018, you need to get organized. Why? Because businesses are.
They know when you’re likely to buy and are constantly trying to manipulate you with a barrage of ads and armies of highly trained sales associates who don’t take “no” for an answer. Read more “Plan your 2018 purchases now, while you still can. Here’s how.”
What should you leave at home when you go shopping this summer? Jennifer Boaro prefers this strategy: Put your credit cards into a cup of water. Then store it in the freezer. Read more “Leave this at home when you go shopping (or you’ll regret it)”
Question: I recently rented a car from Budget in Nashville and returned it to New Orleans. It was in perfect shape when I brought it back.
A few weeks ago, I received a damage claim from the company. They asked me to pay more than $3,000 for repairs.
I’m not responsible for the damage. How do I know? Well, I can tell you that I returned the rental undamaged. But there are two things about Budget’s claim that don’t make sense, either.
First, I returned the car at the Budget Rent-a-Car agency in New Orleans, specifically on Canal Street. Canal Street is in the middle of town, surrounded by buildings. But the landscape in the pictures on my damage claim is completely different. There are no buildings at all. They must have moved the car before taking pictures of it. Who’s to say it wasn’t damaged then?
Read more “Did Budget send me the wrong damage claim?”
Question: I recently rented a car from Budget in Ontario, Calif. When I returned the vehicle, a representative claimed that I scraped the bottom of the front bumper on the passenger side of the car.
I did not cause this damage and told him I wanted to dispute the claim. He gave me a form to complete and told me not to do anything — including notifying my insurance company — until I heard back from Budget.
I received a letter from Budget in February, stating that I would be held responsible for the damage. I immediately notified my credit card insurance company, through which my rental was covered.
To make a long story short, my credit card company is denying the claim because it was filed on the 46th day after the incident, even though I filed the claim the same day that I was notified I was being held responsible.
Read more “Did she wait too long to file a damage claim?”
Murphy wants my help in sorting out a surprise upcharge from Budget, but I’m not sure if I can — or should — try to unravel this for her.
Northern Ireland has its own pecular car rental insurance requirements, and apparently only one brand of MasterCard coverage meets its strict criteria. In other words, if you’re not renting with a MasterCard, you have to buy extra insurance.
Read more ““What should I have done in this situation?””
So you can imagine how dismayed I was when I got a call from Howard Steinberg, who owns several Budget car rental franchises in the United States. Not only had one of his customers exploited a rate error, he says, but I had helped the traveler do it.
How’s that?
Well, to get up to speed on this story, here’s the Q&A column that started it all. It involved a reader named Brandon Chase who had received a mysterious phone call from Budget’s auditing department, notifying him of a billing error. Budget re-charged his credit card $85, apparently not giving him a discount it had promised.
Read more “The rate error story that got away — in a big way”
A couple weeks ago I received a voicemail saying the Budget at the Kansas City airport would be charging me an extra $104 because an “internal audit” found they gave me too much of a discount. My receipt shows the $85 discount, which seemed right since there was an advertised discount.
So, they billed my credit card without my authorization, and then added in all the additional taxes and fees to bring the amount up to $104. I called Budget corporate and the franchise, but nobody would help fix the issue, even though I had a receipt to prove we “agreed” on the lesser amount.
Read more “Oh no, Budget had second thoughts about my discount”
Something about the $667 repair bill that Enterprise Rent-a-Car recently sent Jerry Bitting looked suspicious to him.
For starters, the car didn’t appear to be the one that Bitting, an account executive for a federal agency in Washington, had rented. The dates when the damage occured didn’t match the dates on which he’d driven the Mazda 3. The pictures were taken weeks after he’d returned the car. And questions to Enterprise’s damage recovery unit, asking for an explanation of the inconsistencies, were met with silence.
“I told them that the damages were not there when I picked up the car or dropped it off,” Bitting says.
Read more “Could the Canadian car rental scandal spread?”
Maybe you’ve seen the recent TV report about the allegedly bogus damage claims filed by Budget against its customers in Canada. You’ve probably said to yourself, “A-ha! I knew they were doing that!
So are a lot of other people.
Read more “The car rental industry’s day of reckoning may be close”
Nothing extraordinary happened when Paul Candia rented a car from Budget in New York recently. There’s no frivolous damage claim, no extra fee, not even a rude employee to complain about.
Read more “My rental car is a “gasoline bomb” — am I entitled to a refund?”
