Dear Tripped Up,
Last summer, I flew to Geneva, Switzerland, and picked up a rental car from Budget for a two-week vacation in neighboring France. More precisely, I reserved the car for 13 days and four hours, for an estimated 866 Swiss francs, worth about $1,060 at the time. I ended up returning the vehicle not just on time but a little earlier than planned — after 13 days and 30 minutes — so imagine my surprise when the final bill came to 1,545 francs. The lion’s share of the difference was in the base rental rate, so I assume I lost my discount for returning the car early. I’ve heard of car rental companies recalculating rates for returning a weeklong rental a day early, but hours? That is ridiculous. And I’m not even certain that’s the reason for the steep increase, since no one is talking to me. A U.S. customer service representative told me to get in touch with the Swiss customer service office, which never responded. (An additional note: I’m a little annoyed at the 70-franc cross-border fee, even though the Geneva airport is already on the border.) Can you help? Brendan, Los Angeles
Dear Brendan,
The car rental industry is notorious for charging customers for services they do not need or sometimes never agreed to, but collecting what amounts to a $595 fee for bringing back a car a few hours early seems beyond the pale.
Even more astonishingly, perhaps, is that after examining the documentation you sent me and combing through Budget’s policies, I now believe it was not even a question of hours. You could have saved $595 by returning the car just 10 minutes later than you did.
Here’s what I think happened: Budget rounds up to the next day, so your reservation of 13 days and four hours counted as 14 days, qualifying you for a cheaper two-week base rate of 501 francs (a total of 866 francs, including fees and services).
You wrote that you had the car for 13 days and 30 minutes, but it turns out that isn’t quite true. You actually had it, according to the time stamps on your invoice, for 13 days and 20 minutes.
Budget would still round up for that 20 minutes, right? Well, there might have been another complication: Budget gives its customers a 29-minute grace period before charging for an extra day. That means you returned the car within the grace period. As a result, Budget rounded down instead of up, and voilà, you were disqualified from the two-week rate.
Budget then recalculated your base rate, charging you the daily rate times 13, raising the subtotal to 987 francs and your grand total to 1,545 francs.
So, according to my understanding of this maddening policy, if you had really returned the car after 13 days and 30 minutes — missing the grace period by one minute — you would have been charged for 14 days, salvaging your discount rate.
It’s too bad Budget Switzerland’s customer service didn’t get back to you — I checked and you did send it to the right email address. But Budget did get back to me, confirming that you had been charged for 13 days but not specifying if the grace period was the reason. I also asked if this had all just been a big mistake.
Nope!
“Because the vehicle was returned earlier than the 14-day period, the rental no longer qualified for the weekly promotional pricing,” Lauren Bristow, the director of marketing communications for Avis Budget Group, wrote in response to my emailed questions. “As a result, the system recalculated the rental at the applicable shorter-term rate.”
Even if the company was being a stickler, it’s especially galling that the “weekly” promotional pricing she referred to no longer even applied to your first, and very complete, week with the car. But give Budget some credit for transparency here, even for this hard-to-explain policy. Your rental agreement — the paper you were handed when you checked out the car and that you scanned and sent me — does say, “Prices subject to minimum of 14 rental days.”
And I’ll admit that Budget’s “General Conditions of Rental” (Part 12, if you’re following along) does back her up. “Because special offers and discounts often relate to specific time slots,” it reads, “you may even end up having to pay more if you bring back the vehicle early.”
So I failed you, Brendan, but perhaps this will serve as a warning to others who want to give themselves some extra time before checking in for their flights: Please dillydally at least enough to be sure you don’t return your car too early.
One potentially pleasant dalliance might have been a stop at a cafe in the nearby French town of Ferney-Voltaire, where you could have had one last chance to correctly pronounce “croissant.”
Which brings me to that cross-border fee, where it turns out that a little flourish of French could have saved you. As you mentioned, the airport in Geneva, also known as Genève, is smack on the French-Swiss border, and many car rental agencies — including Budget — have two locations, one in the airport’s French sector, meaning that you are essentially renting a car in France, and the other on the French-speaking Swiss side. Choose the wrong one, and cross-border fees apply.
It turns out that Budget (and its partner Avis) make this option tough to find for anyone booking directly from their site or app, as you did. Type “Geneva” into the Budget site or app and you see only Swiss options. But type in the French spelling, “Geneve” (without the accent mark), and the French agency pops up — and the Swiss ones don’t.
I also asked Budget about this, hoping it might tweak what seems to be a programming error. But Ms. Bristow didn’t mention the website issue in her response, instead going by the book again, noting that “information about the cross-border fee is contained in the terms and conditions and referenced in the reservation confirmation.”
Future Budget renters can avoid the issue by typing in just “Genev” and letting both options load. Or reserve through Hertz or Enterprise, whose sites give you both choices, as they should.
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! Budget Charged Me Almost $600 for Returning a Car Early. appeared first on New York Times.
