What the hell?!

[eirias]

They turned our car off again.

I can't believe this is happening, and what's more, I'm starting to get very worried, because when we're in Southern Utah -- a trip for which we are leaving later this morning, providing, you know, they'll generously let us start the car -- we will have no way of contacting them short of begging a park ranger to let us use their phone. I am angry beyond words.

Suggestions? Who exactly does one go to to get them in major major trouble over this blatant safety violation? Is there an accrediting agency of some kind for car rental companies?

Comments

[darlox.livejournal.com]

Ok... view from a frequent traveller.

Rental cars are a commodity. They can be had anywhere. Price parity is even worse than with the airline industry. So when you find one that is substantially cheaper, or substantially more expensive than everyone else in the pack, generally that's for one of two reasons: They're either positioning themselves as a "Luxury" provider, with perks the others don't have. Or, they're going after the market segment they can screw the most.

Example: Rent-to-own furniture. It's so much cheaper than just going and buying furniture! But they lock you into a contract where, in the end, you end up paying 3 times the cost of the furniture would have been to begin with. When you fall behind on payments, they come and repossess it, spend $20 to steam-clean it, and then start the process with someone else, pocketing the money with virtually no degradation in their ability to re-sell the item.

Car rental is the same way. Firms like Advantage usually show up as being cheaper than all their competition. But then they whack you with fees for this, fees for that, that were buried in the fine print and not included in your quote... they find little dime-sized dings on the hood, that you missed when you checked the car out, and whack you for $500 as a "damage settlement." They're going after the low-income folks who they can, literally, nickel and dime to death.

One of the dangers of that business, is that's also the market segment most likely to not return the vehicle on time, or to try and take it out of the country, etc... So they equip them with GPS units and remote disablement devices. It's most likely that your car wasn't disabled BY them, so much as you were out of cellular range long enough that the car could not check-in with its base station, and it disabled itself, believing that it was somewhere it should not be, or that the remote check-in system had been disabled, and the car was sitting on a chop-shop lot. (Or in Southern Utah, possibly you parked in a canyon or something where it couldn't get GPS fix...) Either way, dead-man switches in rental cars are a controversial issue, and the vast majority of companies do not use them for this very reason.

Sucks that you've gotten caught up in this. But let's just say that responsible travelers on vacation aren't Advantage's target demographic. Folks that none of the other companies will rent to tend to be their demographic...

Read them the riot act when you get phone signal! At very least you'll probably get your car for free. But since you seemed to be asking "how could this happen", I figured I'd answer. Advantage has a horrible rep in the business travel world, and nobody who has any option rents from them more than once!!

Hope things improve for you!

[thekat03.livejournal.com]

oh, so *that* is how someone accidentally remotely turns off the same car twice while being rented out to the same person. i was sitting here thinking, "did they put that big red button right next to the coffee machine or something?"

good luck, eirias!