Passenger's rental car

[Deserted]

One of my passengers yesterday told me that the only reason she was taking a cab was because her rental car had been carted off by the rental company because she was ~90 minutes overdue. (Apparently, she slept through her alarm.) She understood, admitted the fault was hers, etc.

But she was annoyed that they didn't call or knock or anything. I told her to look at it from the company's viewpoint: it was very much like repo'ing a non-rental car, which can be extremely dangerous. (A friend from high school was a repo agent for a while, and he was stabbed (!), shot (!!!), run off the road, and similar things. And I'm sure Argabarga could tell us some stories.) I told her that if it had been me doing it, I sure as hell wouldn't have let her know I was there.

As for the company not calling her about being late, I couldn't think of a nice way to phrase it. "It's not their responsibility to make sure you're on time," was about the nicest thing I thought of to say, so I kept my mouth shut.

In the end, she paid me $47 (~19-mile trip) on top of whatever the rental agency was going to charge to get "her" car back. Lesson learned, I hope -- don't be late renewing your rental with this company.

[prjkt]

Seems a little extreme for 90 minutes... Maybe 90 minutes and seven days overdue...

[wolfie]

Every time I've rented a car, the agreement has listed charges for additional hours and additional days. 90 minutes sounds like an extremely short time frame for a repo, since the rental agency would need to realize the car was overdue, contact the repo firm, and send the agent to where the car was expected to be. Also, sending someone to retrieve the car is going to cost money. To top it off, I doubt if that customer is going to rent from that company ever again.

Unless there has been a LOT of theft of rental cars, it would probably be a lot cheaper to deal with the short-term overdues by informing the customer on return "You were overdue by X hours, the charge for that would be more than the additional day charge, therefore we are charging you $Y for one additional day rather than $Z for X additional hours", and only sending out retrieval teams for cars which had passed a "threshold".

[Jammer]

Seems a little extreme for 90 minutes... Maybe 90 minutes and seven days overdue...

Remember. We are dealing with Customer Standard Time in which 90 minutes could be 9 days to the rest of us.

[Deserted]

Actually... it might really have been 90 minutes. The rental company she used is the only one I personally know of in town where they allow you to rent on a cash-only basis. If the car is late on a cash rental, they don't really have a way to get extra money out of the customer like they would with a credit card... therefore the near-instant pick up makes sense to me.