By Christopher Elliott | Journey Troubleshooter
Q: I just lately rented a automobile in Austin via Nationwide for 40 days. Because it was for a protracted interval, Nationwide break up it into two reservations.
Nationwide charged me accurately for these — $1,212 and $423 — and I returned the automobile with out incident.
Two months later, the corporate charged me one other $1,357. I contacted Enterprise, which owns Nationwide, and it agrees that I used to be overcharged. However the native department in Austin has been utterly unresponsive and unhelpful in resolving this.
I’ve been an government member for over 10 years and by no means had this occur. Please assist me get a refund. — Glenn Roberts, Copperas Cove, Texas
A: Nationwide shouldn’t have charged your bank card two months after you returned your automobile. As a substitute, it ought to have contacted you to let you recognize you had an impressive steadiness and requested on your permission to cost your bank card.
These kinds of late expenses are pretty frequent within the journey business. The bank card corporations permit them, so long as you’ve given the enterprise your bank card quantity and licensed it to make a cost. The commonest late expenses contain incidental bills at inns found after you take a look at, like a minibar cost or a damaged TV. However automobile rental corporations additionally do it typically — and in your case, they did.
You probably did a superb job of holding a paper path of the correspondence between you and Nationwide. It’s all the time tempting to name the corporate to get issues sorted out. However then, there’s no proof that you simply tried to resolve this, and even that the corporate was attempting to assist. And that may actually complicate issues.
In your state of affairs, you had written proof from Enterprise that the Austin location had charged you an incorrect price. However Enterprise deferred to the placement to resolve the billing error, and it seems that after a number of makes an attempt, the Austin location refunded you a bit of greater than half the quantity.
Might you’ve got prevented this from taking place? No, however Nationwide may have. It break up the reservation into two, apparently as a result of the system doesn’t settle for reservations longer than 30 days on its web site.
If I had been a bettin’ man, I’d say that Nationwide had a system that then reconnected each of your reservations after which recalculated your price as if you happen to’d made two separate reservations. So the additional cost may need been a worth differential. However that’s my assumption, based mostly on my conversations with Nationwide and also you, along with your paper path. (Airways do this type of factor routinely when prospects ebook “illegal” itineraries referred to as hidden metropolis tickets — however that’s a narrative for one more time.)
Subsequent time, perhaps insist on having only one reservation. That retains issues easy and avoids a doable further cost.
I contacted Enterprise in your behalf. The corporate reviewed your file and refunded the steadiness of your $1,357.
