Be Careful When Changing Your Car Reservation

I’m not normally too big on renting cars, but occasionally it’s a necessity. On a recent trip to Seattle, I knew I wanted to get out of the city to explore some of the Olympic Peninsula, so I wasn’t going to get away without renting a car. The details of the end of the time in Seattle were a little up in the air when I locked in my car rental reservation.

I was able to get a rental with Hertz for around $250 for a week. This is a little higher than my ideal car rental price of around $30 per day, but wasn’t too much more expensive to make me reconsider my plans.

After spending a lovely week hiking in different parts of Olympic National Park, I had finally figured out the details of the last couple of days in the city, and realized that it made way more sense to drop the car off at a downtown rental location. Typically, there is no drop fee or it’s really small when picking up a car at the airport and dropping in a nearby city. I called ahead to make the change and was told that the fee would be an additional $29. Considering it was going to save me some time and a fair amount of hassle, I decided to make the change.

Fast forward to actually dropping off the car, and the price on my bill was about $90 more. I pretty much always expect something to go wrong with car rentals, so this really didn’t surprise me. I talked to the lady who was working at the counter, but the location was a non-corporate location and she was unable to get the issued solved then and there. She did, however, open up a support ticket and give me a number to call for followup.

When I arrived at the hotel, I had a chance to take a look at my original bill and my new bill and was finally able to figure out what went wrong. Hertz had dropped a coupon off of my account when they made the change to my reservation!

This lesson reinforced to me that car rental companies take every chance they can to rip off customers and that it’s always necessary to check and double check your bill after finishing a car rental, especially if you make a change to your reservation.

Have you ever made a chance to a car rental reservation and had something weird happen?