An Avis customer booked a week-long full-size rental at the Dubuque, Iowa airport for $199.64, including unlimited mileage, but was charged $6,288.22 because the rental company claiming he drove a white Toyota Camry Hybrid enough to circle the earth four times.
He’d have had to average 587 miles per hour, 24 hours a day. That makes no sense. Plus, his rate and receipt even show “UNLIMITED” miles.
When he picked up the vehicle, he says the woman at the counter told him she didn’t actually work for Avis. The manager had asked her to fill in, and she cl
was helping for free. Maybe controls and fleet tracking at that location aren’t especially strong?
The Invoice Is Insane
According to the final invoice:
- Odometer out: 26
- Odometer in: 95,199
- Total driven: 29,637 miles
- Miles billed: 19,638
- Mileage rate: 25 cents
- Mileage charge: $4,909.50
The reservation also says “Mileage: Unlimited.”
Where do we even begin? 95,199 minus 26 is not 29,637. Covering that distance during the 162-hour rental would require an average speed of 587.5 miles per hour without stopping for fuel, food or sleep. Driving 29,637 miles would still require averaging 182.9 miles per hour. Even the 19,638 miles Avis actually billed would mean averaging 121.2 miles per hour for the entire rental.
29,637 “total driven” – 19,638 miles billed = 9,999 miles So maybe Avis’s system is using that as generic stand-in for unlimited mileage, but another part of its billing system treated it as a literal allowance and charged everything above 9,999?
What’s crazy of course is that feels are being piled onto the false mileage charges.
- Incorrect charge for mileage: $4,909.50
- Additional concession recovery fee: $490.95
- Additional Iowa and other taxes: $648.06
- Total overcharge: $6,048.51
But The Rate Included Unlimited Miles!
Avis can’t even charge this customer for “excess miles” if they’d driven 100,000 miles because an unlimited mileage rate has no excess miles point. Avis advertises unlimited mileage for weekly and cross-country rentals, even. Its rental terms say customers pay mileage charges only “if applicable, at the rate stated in the Agreement.” Here both the reservation and even the final rate calculation state ‘unlimited’.
Whether unlimited really means unlimited was tested in a similarly absurd Hertz incident. A customer actually drove 25,000 miles during a month-long rental with unlimited mileage. A local Hertz manager demanded $10,000 and threatened to call the police when the customer objected. Hertz corporate eventually apologized and said, “Per the terms of the contract, the customer will not be billed for mileage.”
There is one wrinkle. The customer says he used a very favorable corporate discount code and was not asked for proof of eligibility. Avis’s terms allow it to void a corporate rate when a renter is not eligible. That would permit Avis reprice the rental at a standard rate, not choose a mileage-limited rate (and that’s not what is happening here in any case).
Hertz Used To Arrest Customers, But Avis Is Famous For Doing ‘This’
Hertz may be known for having customers arrested, because they used to keep such poor tabs on their fleet that they’d get a car returned, lose track of it and report it stolen, and then the next customer who rented it would get pulled over. But they seem to have solved that problem (when they brought on Palantir to help track their fleet). Mileage issues seem to be Avis’s special gift to renters.
- In 2022 an Avis customer reported that the company listed his starting mileage as 5 instead of approximately 19,500, producing a receipt showing 19,576 miles driven in 36 hours.
- Another Avis customer’s rental was improperly checked in and out and they billed roughly $8,500 based on all 31,689 miles already on one vehicle (they eventually refunded about $8,100).
- A customer in Toronto drove about 300 kilometers during a three-day rental. Avis charged her more than C$8,000 for driving 36,482 kilometers. After media attention, it blamed an odometer-reading error, apologized and refunded the money.
- An Avis customer renting one way between Rochester and Buffalo was billed $7,053.79 for supposedly driving 13,351 miles in 13 hours. They disputed the charge with American Express, but it reportedly took Avis nearly seven months to fix the issue and threatened to ban him over a remaining balance of approximately $4.
- Last year, an Avis customer at LAX was charged more than $16,000 for allegedly driving 30,500 miles in five days. After repeated calls, Avis said the return employee had entered approximately 50,000 miles instead of 20,000 and finally issued a corrected receipt.
How To Deal With This Problem
Dispute the error with Avis. File a chargeback with your credit card for being charged an incorrect amount and services not billed as agreed (not as an unauthorized merchant transaction). Then demand that Avis produce:
- The prior and next rental records for the vehicle
- Pickup and return odometer photographs
- Any ‘connected car’ odometer and location data
- Agent entry logs
You also ultimately need a corrected final receipt showing no balance. A credit card chargeback can return the money to you while Avis’s system shows an unpaid balance, which would cause them to send you to collections, ban you, or both.
Here, the customer can also file an Iowa Attorney General consumer complaint, and if none of that works go to small claims court. (Avis’s contract requires 30 days written notice before bringing a claim, but exempts small claims cases from mandatory arbitration.)
Hertz people Hertz people. (Play on hurt people hurt people.)
Wait, Avis? Sonova… How are we supposed to use our calendar-year $120 prepaid Avis statement credit with the Citi® / AAdvantage® Executive World Elite Mastercard now? *smh*
I always get a receipt and check EVERYTHING when I pick up a car – Mileage, Gas, and I take pictures of the car – so that it is timed, dated and in the spot of the pickup number – and then I do the same when I return the vehicle – that is my checklist!
This is why lawyers were invented. And I would sue for triple damages.
@Arturo S. gets it; though, more broadly, we can call them ‘mercenaries,’ and in this case, worth every penny.
Or you can simply contact Avis and get it resolved. Everything isn’t a disaster that sounds like the end of the world and please @Auturo drop the “sue them” mentality. The last thing we need is more ambulance chasers. It was a mistake and I’m sure it got readily resolved (even if Gary made it sound like a huge deal)
Rental car companies are the worst. I’ve been billed $300 cleaning for smoking and I do not smoke. I was billed $50 for gas, when I filled it up literally two miles from airport. I had to submit my gas receipt showing I filled up prior to arrival to get that back. There is no way I can go through the 5 gallons ($10/gallon) of gas between the time on the receipt and when it got dropped off which was less than ten minutes. Got nailed with a $250 cleaning fee and I return my cars nearly spotless, aside from the standard dirt your shoes track in. They are always adding on fees to see if they can get away with it. It’s ridiculous. Total scam. I always contest and they are typically fast to refund aside from the gas one.
Great post Gary. How does one go about demanding those things from Avis?
Has he tried yet to work with Avis? I can’t imagine this would be an issue as it’s so obviously wrong.
In the end, it’s funny and entertaining, but probably a big nothing burger.
Thinking of this differently, maybe it would be a good way to rack up credit card points and miles? Do they claw back the points when the rental company refunds the bogus part of the bill? What happens if you buy an expensive airfare with those points during the interim- the time after you’ve paid for the rental car but before car rental corporate figures out their embarrassing error?
Mwuahahahaha
Multiple issues with sister company Budget on 2 rentals of about 3 weeks over a month.
First rental in Florida, sudden rainstorm at night and found out windshield wipers worn down and ineffective. At 9PM, found an auto parts store and they installed new wipers and found out reservoir was also empty. Next day, sudden rainstorm and driver’s wiper arm malfunctions and twice the wiper flys off in pieces. Go to airport and get another vehicle and comped 1)4 tank of gas, but later charged for completely empty tank. A few days later, changing cities to final destination in Florida and need to stop every 15 miles to clean love bugs off windshield as reservoir was empty and after refilling, sprayed fluid on rear windshield but not front windshield. Called Budget customer service , and spoke to 2 people in India, and told they would not reimburse for wipers and hung up on me. Contacted later by original site of rental and told would refund $150 and apologized. NO refund received.
Next rental in Arizona, no one in lot at pickup or return of vehicle. Assigned specific vehicle and took photos of multiple preexisting scratches.
Again, that evening, reservoir for windshield is found to be empty. Drive maybe 330 miles locally and receipt received later listed 1713 miles. Unable to reach local rental site as All phone calls go to India. Later charged about $140 for “damages”. Immediately called Chase and contested, Chase refunded the charge. Called Budget and asked for photos of damage and all documentation and told them I was contesting with Chase. Now in limbo. Looks like Budget Avis are off our list.
What are they complaining about? They only billed for 19,638 miles. Seems like a pretty good deal to me.
I had a similar experience with Alamo last year, Rented a car at HNL for FIVE hours and apparently I drove about 900 miles on Oahu. Huge surcharge on an unlimited miles rental plus it was physically impossible to have driven this much in that time. The whole situation was absurd, took multiple phone calls and emails, but eventually I got to someone who refunded the excess charges.
Not only do I photograph the odometer at pickup and return, I frame the photo to show the location signage in the background.
We live in a world of document everything.
Similar experience with Avis In June. Dropped the car back at BOS fully prepaid, got a printout. 3 days later a $280 charge shows up on my CC.
Someone at Avis BOS re-opened the RA changed the drop off location to a military base in FL,(which means the car allegedly got from BOS to FL in 14 hours (again a Camry Hybrid).
In trying to get this fixed I had 7 different Avis employees lie to me and tell me the refund had been processed and the RA changed back. Two Avis employees tell me it had been escalated which it hadn’t. One Avis employee tell me I’d been sent a compensation payment, which they hadn’t.
Ended up contacting the CEO’s office email address and finally got resolution after 5 weeks where they refunded the $280 in two parts 7 days apart from some reason. The RA still shows FL. I gave up.
P.S. Gary, It doesn’t affect US customers but you should do a story on how Avis (and it seems only Avis) fleece customers who pre-pay US rentals in foreign currencies. If the forex market moves against Avis between the payment and the rental end date then Avis charge the customer the difference. Happy for you to contact me and I can explain this scam in more detail.
Avis is now paperless. I like having paperwork on checking out the car.
@Retired Gambler — Read the room. Your attempt to carry-water for a multi-billion dollar corporation when they clearly messed up here is just sad. This is one instance where suing and good representation are well-advised. We really should all be standing with consumers here, inserting plausible deniability in the face of obvious corporate malfeasance.
Always take pictures of
OUT Mileage and Fuel and
IN Mileage and Fuel.
Shame on rental companies not doing their quick review of the previous renters IN Mileage
and issue would be solved.
Its amazing all the time and electrons wasted by the complainer and writer over an obvious typo is stag-ger-ing… Does anyone doubt it won’t get fixed despite all the extreme cases rehashed above.
What is disturbing is that a computer didn’t have obvious edit checks built into it. And/or warnings that entry was out of ordinary bounds. Computer Science 101, garbage in, garbage out. So much for effective Sarbanes-Oxley legislation and controls I wasted much of my life on…
@retired Gambler – Because the company is the problem. If Avis can’t concede that the renter didn’t drive the car at 587 miles an hour nonstop for a week then the customer isn’t the issue. Avis needs to make this right.
@Christian — You must’ve seen by now that a few commenters, like @Retired Gambler, @George Romey, almost as if they were paid-shills, nearly always take the pro-industry, pro-corporate, anti-consumer, anti-worker, insert plausible deniability, etc., side of everything, all the time, here, there, everywhere, all the blogs.
Many years ago, I went to return a Hertz car and was told they had no record of me renting the car. They told me to just leave it but couldn’t give me any documentation to that effect. “You mean I can just keep the car and drive it home?” Eventually I got the manager to sign a letter that I had returned the car.
Last rental from Budget at RDU – the vehicle reeked of pot smoke. Unbearable.
We said no, because they will try and charge a cleaning fee.
Insisted on a new vehicle but it took a while.
Employee laughed at our complaint.
I’ll remove Budget/Avis and Hertz from my personal ban list.
I rent from Enterprise. Never issues like this. Even when I ran over a nail about five minutes out of the rental agency at BWI. Got the car back just as the tire was deflated. Within five minutes in a different car and on my way. I was prepared to be charged for the cost of the tire but was not.
@George Romey — Huh. A rare non-shill comment, sorta. From a consumer perspective, I actually agree somewhat about Enterprise, since they’re a private corporation (by the founding family rather than public shareholders), and most of their operations seem decent, reliable, less scammy, but things can still get messy, even with them.
(And, you must know that the Taylor family does donate specifically to mostly-Republican Super-PACs, while their publicly traded competitors like Hertz and Avis donate to both parties, not that it matters much if you just want a rental car and not to get scammed.)
Most of the comments advising carefully documenting odometer, gas tank, condition of vehicle are good ideas, regardless, even with Enterprise.
I experienced exactly the same thing with Avis at Philadelphia airport. I picked up a car in Annapolis at 1 pm for a one way drop off to PHL which I did 3 hours later, a distance of un der 150 miles. I was aware I was responsible for the miles used so I dropped the car off, they checked it, no extra charges and gave me the receipt. I checked it and saw that they had charge my for almost 4,000 miles of driving…. in under 4 hours. I immediately highlighted this to the guy who checked me in but he told me that he could not reverse it and I had to go to the office to have it done. I went to the office and of course there was a huge line. I then walked to the other side of the lot and into the President’s Club and initially they told me there was noting they could do, then they told me it was correct and then they realized the initial mileage was wrong. After 30 minutes they fixed it but no apology and I almost missed my flgiht.
Rental Cars…When in Europe the green handle isn’t diesel. Don’t ask how I know.
I rented from Budget in the USVI during Covid 2020 I took full coverage insurance when I returned the car I was billed for scratches on the hood of the car and my response was please claim it from the insurance, I was told that I needed a police report to make a claim but if I didn’t know that there were scratches how can I get a report, I was threatened with being sued and reported to the credit agency, I wrote to Budget and was informed that the USVI office was a franchise and they had no control over that office, I responded that I rented it from Budget business web site and not the office, all my emails were CC to Better Business Bureau, my Local congressional representative, my state senator and consumer protection, they eventually stop responding when they received a letter from my congressman that he was investigating.
Maybe the charge was for miles traveled not miles driven. Dubuque, Iowa travels about 765 miles per hour around the axis of the Earth. It sounds like they may have given a break on the week’s rental. Be glad that they were not charging miles traveled around the Sun (about 66,627 mph) or miles traveled around the Milky Way Galaxy center (about 514,000 miles per hour).