Fresh from Public radio - today’s morning news.
US Corporations doing well - profits rising, workers not doing well. Wages stagnant.
It is understandable after reading this case, why US Corps doing well specifically Enterprise Rent-a-car!!!
Pay the $500 deductible that you agreed to do when you rented the car (assuming you did as **muldoonthief **suggested and checked with your credit card first). Then never rent from Enterprise again and take a video of your walkthrough with the next car you rent. This is something I ALWAYS do. I’m already walking around the car, I might as well whip out my phone and take footage that can be then used to corroborate anything I need to later.
That said, I just had my own Enterprise run-in this week. Tuesday, I get a call and voicemail on my mobile phone while I’m at work in a meeting. I listen to the VM and it’s Katie from Enterprise in West Des Moines apologizing that they don’t have any cars for the night to fulfill my reservation. Well, crap. The big problem is that I live in Minnesota. And I wasn’t planning on going to West Des Moines that night or any time in the foreseeable future. I’ve got a couple trips planned, but none with rental cars, so wtf? They had my first and last name and my (unpublished mobile) phone number.
I call Katie back, she chalks it up to a glitch in the system. Then I talk it out on another forum if I should be worried about some new form of identity theft. A bigger red flag emerges and I call Katie back, she doesn’t have any more info about the reservation except that it was for 5pm that night and it’s under my first and last name. She then suggests I call corporate.
Monique at Enterprise tries to look up my reservation by my phone number and doesn’t see it. Then tries it by my last name and finds it. “Are you (first name) B (last name)?”
“No, I’m (first name) S (last name).” I replied.
“Ahh, there’s the problem…” Apparently Enterprise takes reservations over the phone and books them by the person’s last name to start. The operator looked up (last name, first) found me with all my info on the account and used that instead of (last name, first B) for the other person who hadn’t rented from them before.
They have a dumb set up apparently. But said that without an ID, they wouldn’t rent to my near-name doppelganger. I ended up finding him on facebook, he lives in Cedar Rapids, IA. So I sent him a message that his rental car wasn’t available.
When I rented a vehicle recently, they took digital photographs of the car from every angle just before we took possession, and informed us that it would be photographed again when we returned it. Given the modern ubiquity and cheapness of good quality digital cameras, it seems silly that most car rental places rely on a walkabout instead. Photos would shut down any accusations of bad faith from either party immediately.
How did you pay for the rental? Most credit card issuers automatically provide secondary coverage for vehicle rentals. In other words, they’ll cover the deductible. It may be too late to file a claim by now, though.
I paid with my credit card, and will talk to the credit card company & see what they say.
Thanks
Hitesh
The last car I rented, I picked up at just after midnight… in a poorly lit parking lot… in a drizzle. I did the walk-around, but I could have easily missed something. We had actually already rejected one car, because it reeked of cigarette smoke (something that I would have expected the rental agency to have picked up on).