The Traveling Ridleys: Sunday Journal

We should have known better. I’ll say it up front. I have rented hundreds of rental cars, mostly in the USA, but also in France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland and Scotland. I remember returning a car in Newark to an off-airport rental car agency (name withheld for fear of possible litigation) and watching the agents assess a laundry list of damages to a very distraught mom and her tweenaged daughter for what looked to be minor damage, in the normal wear and tear category. Like I said, we should have known better, and I usually take the insurance for this reason (or was covered by a corporate policy).

When we rented a car for our journeying around the United Kingdom, we hired it from a discount agency through a third-party aggregator. At the time, I don’t think either of us noticed that the agency was “contactless”. If we did, we may have thought it was a terminology hangover from COVID or something but either way it didn’t set off any alarm bells. It will in the future and should to you.

Let me note that the car itself was fine. But the unnamed company’s technologies and administrative processes are, in a word, inept, and leave it wide open for them to fraudulently assess damages to a consumer. Oh, and their customer service stinks too.

Check-out, on the front end, requires uploading countless documents, communication via email and a lot of back and forth. It was, at times, frustrating, but not overly difficult. We declined the exorbitant insurance fees after calling our credit card company and were told that the car would be covered under their benefits partner’s insurance. Hooray. We went to collect our car and while in the cab got a call that our original hired car had a flat and we needed to redirect to another rental car location. No worries, mate. Redirect we did.

We arrived at the new garage and it was quiet. Crickets. A mausoleum. No one around at all, it was a Sunday afternoon. We couldn’t get in. The door was locked. There was no apparent way to retrieve the car or access the garage and I wondered, for a brief moment at least, that if after paying a couple of thousand dollars for a three-month rental if I’d been had and what was happening with my other personal information these blokes had in their possession. I rang back the phone of the man who called and redirected us. No answer. Uh oh.

But then he phoned back and gave some instructions on where to find the car. It was there, with a young man from the rental agency listening to the radio sitting in another car. The key was in mine, as was the pink copy of a short, one-page form with mileage and gas level marked. Nothing else. The car was dirty. It had not been vacuumed. There was sand on the seats and in the trunk. I took a spin around the car. Marks and scuffs all around. None marked on the form left for me.

I approached the man. “Uh, should we do a walk around the car together? There are some scuffs on it, and I don’t want to get charged”, I said. “That’s just dirt. None of that is consequential enough to matter”, he replied, “but go ahead and take some photos and email the company if it makes you feel better.” Trust, David, but verify. I did just as he instructed, emailing some hastily taken photos of what appeared to be the most significant marks, albeit all were minor, but Newark was flashing back in my mind, trusting him at his word that some of the other smaller ones would not matter. I received no acknowledgment or response. I emailed them again. Ditto, nada. “Oh well”, I thought, “it’ll be fine”.

I’ll note here that we incurred zero damage on the car while it was in our possession. Not a scuff, scratch or mark. But, of course, this post wouldn’t exist if the aforementioned nameless agency agreed with me.

We were returning the car 7 days sooner than our original booking permitted, so about 7 days before my new return date, I tried emailing and calling all of the email addresses and phone numbers from my check-out process to try to confirm where to drop the car (since we’d collected it from a different location than we were originally supposed to) and what to do. No responses. No replies. I wasn’t surprised. I called the roadside assistance number on the decal on the windshield. Out of service, hmm good thing we didn’t get stuck somewhere and need roadside assistance. I emailed the roadside assistance email to which I received an autoreply which said that the company (different name from the one from whom we rented) no longer operates in the UK. Yikes. Then I googled our rental car company’s name and found their website and a phone number. I called and, miraculously, someone answered. I spoke with “Alex”. Alex is the bright spot, the star of the team. Very helpful, told me everything I needed to know. The return was smooth, leave it in a spot in the garage and drop the key in the box. I would have felt better with a walk-around and some kind of confirmation that this isn’t some weird shell company, but I was, again, hoping for the best. I called the customer service line and got my new best friend, Alex, again (also a troubling sign that three times I’d called now, and three times I got Alex) and confirmed I’d done right. I had.

A week after returning the car, we get a fraud alert from the credit card company. Unnamed rental car agency trying to push through some charges. “Uh oh”, my heart sunk. I called the card company and told them to decline the charge. Then I talked to their benefits department who told me we’d rented the car too long to be eligible for their coverage. What we were told in July wasn’t wrong, but they had needed to ask, or we needed to disclose the duration of the rental. Ugh. We were stuck.

I began to dispute the charges. I called customer service and got my buddy Alex. He told me what to do on their website. The company’s website is not flawless. It is buggy. The dispute wouldn’t go through. Minimal error messages indicated as to why. I had tried twice: first from my phone, since the photos were still there, the second from my laptop. Both times it failed. The first time it probably didn’t submit because I was uploading HEIC files (Apple’s new compressed photo format), though no error messages indicated that on the mobile user interface. The laptop did, however, so I converted them to .jpg files and uploaded. Blank form returned upon submit, no error messages, and no dispute submitted. I called back, and predictably, got Alex. He helped me make sure I did everything correctly the third time. Same result. All fields completed, no warning message and no dispute submitted. He gave me an email address to send the dispute to instead, puzzled (although probably thinking it was user error. It wasn’t.) as to why it didn’t work.

That afternoon, I got two emails. One requesting payment with a link, the other threatening legal action in 10 business days. I waited until the next day, thinking maybe the two emails were a timing issue and they will review my dispute and acknowledge it. But after more than 24 hours, I didn’t really want to leave it to chance. I’ve been frustrated with unnamed car rental agency but now I’m annoyed. I call them. I don’t get Alex. I got a “manager”, or at least she said she was when I asked to escalate to one later on. It was clear that no one had looked at the photos I’d submitted with my dispute, not to mention either time back in July. She called up the July photos (thank goodness I’d sent them) and fixated on a tire she claimed I’d curbed at some point along the way because, I assume, I hadn’t taken a photo of any of the tires in July. Who knows, maybe that one was legit. I said, ok, I’ll pay for the tire, what’s the cost of that. She wouldn’t budge. I got mad. I relayed my frustrations with their processes, with the cleanliness of the car upon check out, with the fact that their “contactless” process is a sham. She interrupted me several times. I got madder. She finally let me finish uninterrupted and then quoted me a bunch of regulation numbers from the ombudsperson for the industry and saying, basically, “buyer beware” and “you’re screwed” (I’m paraphrasing). I asked for the email of the ombudsperson. She didn’t like that. She told me that I needed to submit a dispute. Sending me back to that same buggy website. I relayed what had transpired the day before with my attempts. She accused me, in tone if not in words, of being an idiot. She submitted a “test dispute” on my case and literally said “see, it works”. Grrr. Maybe this is why they are contactless, they just don’t like people.

I said to her, shifting my tone of voice from clear frustration, and said, “look, I don’t think I caused any of this damage, but let me pay for the tire and you write off the rest. I didn’t do anything to damage that car”. Nope. Not a chance. She has a process and doesn’t deviate from it (ok, she probably is the manager. Not a very good one, mind you, but a manager). She told me I needed to submit the dispute through the site and if it didn’t work, I could email it to the same email address I already had. She told me I could only speak to the industry ombudsperson if I did this. They have no direct website, phone number or email address (of course they don’t, or at least it won’t be shared by unnamed company). She suggested I break the photos up into a couple of disputes (admittedly a helpful suggestion) since maybe the file size was a problem. I did. I submitted the dispute into their system with all of my notes, history of the rental, frustrations with the process and attempts to submit my dispute. I submitted it with only three of the photos (selected as they were the smallest). It worked! Voila! I went back in to submit a second dispute, referencing the other with its logged number (this being the third “dispute” filed on my rental agreement as the “manager” had proudly proved me wrong with a dummy dispute) with the rest of the photos. Nope. Rejected. You cannot have more than two disputes per rental agreement. Oh, for the love of… I emailed all the photos again (this being the fourth time) with reference back to my dispute in the system.

Now I wait. Wait for the ombuds angels to be open to hear my complaint or for some amicable resolution with the company. So, my fellow car renters: beware a “contactless” rental car company. It’s a scam.