Dear Tripped Up,
In September 2024, during a vacation to Naples, Italy, my wife and I rented a stick-shift S.U.V. from Avis for a trip to Brindisi, estimated cost $157. I’ve been driving manual cars for much of my 78 years, and immediately noticed something wrong with the transmission. After less than a mile, we had to pull over and call the Avis office for help. We tried five times (you can check our phone records) and no one picked up. So we left the car where it was — in a tunnel — and walked back to the agency, about two-tenths of a mile on a more direct pedestrian route. We filled out a form about the incident and the agent gave us a new car, no questions asked. But when our credit card statement arrived, we saw Avis had billed us $1,367 for “miscellaneous charges.” I called Avis’s U.S. customer service line to ask for details, and followed up via email multiple times. Finally, months later, the company informed me that the Naples agency had charged us for repairs to the clutch, plus towing. Even after I sent Avis a map of our route and noted that only 17 minutes had elapsed between signing the contract and our first phone call, the company continues to insist it was our fault. Can you help? James, Santa Rosa, Calif.
Dear James,
I can only imagine the cumulative damage American drivers, coddled by our nation’s ever-increasing dependence on automatic transmissions, have caused to stick-shift rental fleets in foreign lands.
But I can find no evidence that a few minutes is enough to destroy a car’s clutch, even by a teenager learning to drive manual in a high school parking lot, let alone by an experienced motorist trying to make the most of a pleasant day in Italy.
Mike Porcelli, an adjunct lecturer of automotive mechanics at Bronx Community College and a master certified mechanic who has testified as an expert witness for decades, agreed with me in a phone interview. “A guy in his 70s doing this damage in a few minutes?” he said. “I don’t see how it’s possible.”
I am also impressed at how well you documented the incident, and how effectively you argued your viewpoint to Avis. You also get a B-plus for patience, waiting four full months and sending eight emails before letting loose your first curse word, calling the S.U.V. a “broken-down piece of” something-or-other.
The salty language didn’t do any good. Three days later a representative from Avis corporate customer service wrote back via email to tell you the Naples office hadn’t budged: “It is still up to the international rental location to waive the charges,” he wrote.
I shared your story with Avis’s public relations firm, which passed it on to the company, and you have now received a $1,367 refund along with a note from someone in the executive office of Avis’s Britain-based Europe, Middle East and Africa operation, who wrote that “our office has determined that the damage charge was applied in error.”
Around the same time, Avis sent me a statement from James Adams, an executive vice president at the Avis Budget Group.
“Following a thorough internal review, we determined that the original damage charge was applied in error due to a misunderstanding at the location,” he wrote. “We regret the delay in resolving the matter and have apologized to the customer for the inconvenience and frustration this experience caused.”
(I will interrupt the statement to note that the email you received did not, in fact, contain anything resembling an apology, though it did offer “kind regards.”)
From your back and forth with Avis, it seems the sticking point was the distance driven during the rental. The agency recorded the rental mileage as 20 kilometers — about 12 miles — which presumably would have given you more time to trash the clutch. You claim (and your map and time-stamped documents seem to substantiate) that you drove it 1.5 kilometers, or just a hair under a mile.
I checked the location of the repair shop listed on the invoice Avis sent to you (albeit nearly four months after you asked for it) and noticed that the quickest route between it and your Avis rental agency in Naples is 17.4 kilometers, which could account for most of that discrepancy.
Such a clerical error is understandable, but it still should not have taken months for Avis to come to a decision (and do so in its own favor). You should have received documentation of the repair and a breakdown of the costs long before you saw the mysterious “miscellaneous charges” on your credit card statement.
Instead, it took until Dec. 17 — after three emails and one phone call from you — to tell you that the repair was for the clutch, that the company was investigating the charge and that someone would get back to you within 10 calendar days.
And it was 52 calendar days after that, on Feb. 7, that Avis got back to you to tell you it had determined you were correctly billed 1,000 euros, about $1,110 at the time, plus 22 percent tax, and attached documentation. That included a mechanic’s bill for exactly €819.23, and a note that the remainder was for towing.
At this point in a Tripped Up column, I typically provide advice to readers on how to avoid such a predicament when renting cars abroad. I’m not sure how to do so here.
I’ve already advised travelers to rent from international rather than local companies to make it easier to file a complaint if something goes wrong — but you did that, and it didn’t help. I’ve proposed paying for the agency’s own collision damage waiver even if you’re otherwise insured to avoid the bureaucracy of filing an insurance claim, but that would most likely not have applied in your case, since Avis claimed the damage was mechanical, a category often excluded from these waivers. I’ve written about the need to take detailed video of a rental car at both pickup and return, but you can’t film a clutch. And, of course, I’m always encouraging everyone to write to me if they’ve exhausted all other forms of appeal.
So instead, I’ll just add a personal note: Days before I started writing this column, I reserved a stick shift for a family trip to Morocco in December. Wish me luck, because I haven’t driven a car with manual transmission in nearly 20 years — and that ended with my 1992 Mazda broken down on the New Jersey Turnpike.
If you need advice about a best-laid travel plan that went awry, send an email to [email protected].
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Seth Kugel is the columnist for “Tripped Up,” an advice column that helps readers navigate the often confusing world of travel.
The post Help! My Rental Car Died Within a Mile, and Avis Charged Me $1,367. appeared first on New York Times.
