Car Rental and Early Return

[Shannon G]

Has anyone ever had the experience of being charged more when you returned a rental car early?

Right now I am steamed at National. DH and I were vacationing in WDW, and were supposed to be there 9/23 - 9/28. Due to a family emergency, we had to rush home the morning of 9/26 (FIL was in a very serious car accident). When I returned the car at 6:30 am on 9/26, I was charged $40 more than my original reservation price. I wen to the counter to question it, and was told that it was because I had a weekly rate (5 days or more qualifies for the weekly rates) and since I returned it early it was now a 3 day rental, and I was being charged the regular daily rate. Even after I explained that we had to return home early due to an emergency, nothing was done - I was charged the daily rate for the 3 days we had the car.

This makes no sense to me. We return the car early and get charged more??? They can rent it out sooner and make more money!!! Even this is their general policy, it would seem that there could be exceptions made for extraordinary circumstances. I do plan on contacting National, but I don't have my receipt with me at the moment, so I have to wait until tonight to email them with all the information.

Thanks for letting me vent!

 

[CarolA]

The policy is normally that if you do not keep the car for the length of time specified to get your speical rate (i.e. weekly) you go to the daily rate. So they were correct in charging you more money.

As to the special circumstances, I think that in the past people have taken advantage of things like that which has made the travel industry reluctant to give discounts. (For example, to get a breavement fare you must now provide a copy of the death certificate to Delta!) I would call National and volunteer to provide some proof of your circumstance, but....

 

[safetymom]

That is the policy of the car rental places. Also lots of places don't have the room to get cars back early. That isn't a problem at MCO but they have a corporate policy that early returns could be based on daily then rather than weekly rates.

I hope your father in law is recuperating. Didn't you also have a problem then with the airline?

 

[kda]

Your reason for returing the car early was a family emergency, but throughout the years I've ready many, many posts where people said they purposely booked the car for a week to get the cheaper rate and planned to return it 'early' and expected to be charged the weekly rate. Rental companies caught on to this a long time ago and developed policies to discourage this practice. Our current National EA rental for November states "minimum charge is 8 nights", which is the time period we booked. I'm not happy with this at all. It would seem much more "fair" to just charge us for the time period we keep the car (if we needed to return it early). Guess rental companies can make any policies they want -- we just need to be sure we understand what the terms are and if we're willing to accept those.

Hope you can convince them you had a true emergency and weren't just trying to pay less $$$$.

 

[Shannon G]

Thanks for the responses - I haven't had time to contact them yet, so we'll see what happens. It really isn't that big a deal, but you know how one little thing can really set you off when you've already got a lot of other stuff going on? It's only $40, and I'm not sure it's worth the hassle.

Yes, we also had to pay more for airfare, but I guess I expected that, because we were changing to another flight. I guess I saw that differently than returning a car early. When I called Southwest to change our flights, I explained we had a family emergency, and was told it would cost $100 more per ticket. Since we had the really cheap internet rate, it just brought our tickets up to a "normal" rate. Since no discount for emergency circumstances was mentioned, and it didn't occur to me to ask (at 4:00 am) I called and inquired on Monday (3 days later) and was told that sometimes they may use discretion to offer a "sympathy" fare, but only at the time of booking, nothing can be done after-the-fact.

Like I said, it's not that big a deal, it just had never occured to me that we might be charged more to return the car early.

safetymom - thanks for asking about FIL. It's not good - he has pulled through so far, but has had serious brain trauma, and it is very uncertain what, if any, abilities he will retain/recover. If he pulls through (which is still uncertain), he has a long, hard road ahead of him.

 

[safetymom]

So sorry to hear that about your FIL. Sending prayers and pixie dust for all of you.